Penguin Michael Joseph signs Gyles Brandreth’s Winnie-the-Pooh biography
Penguin Michael Joseph will publish Somewhere, A Boy and A Bear, Gyles Brandreth’s biography of AA Milne, Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh, which promises "love affairs and litigation, idyllic games of Poohsticks and heart-rending family rifts".
Dan Bunyard, publishing director for non-fiction, bought world all-language rights from Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown. It will be published on 25th September in hardback, e-book and audiobook download, supported by a high-profile media campaign and national UK events tour.
The book will coincide with Winnie-the-Pooh’s 100th birthday, for which Brandreth has campaigned to have Christopher Robin’s original childhood toys to be returned to England from the New York Public Library.
Penguin Michael Joseph said: “Bestselling biographer Gyles Brandreth knew the real Christopher Robin and his new book is both an intimate and revealing biography of AA Milne (to whom there was so much more than Pooh) and a fascinating exploration of fathers and sons, children and their parents and the nature of childhood itself.
“With an extraordinary cast list including Winston Churchill, Elizabeth II and Walt Disney, love affairs and litigation, idyllic games of Poohsticks and heart-rending family rifts, this is the remarkable story of one of Britain’s most brilliant yet least known writers, and of his most famous creation.”
Brandreth said: “This has been such a special book to write. It springs from my friendship with Christopher Robin Milne.
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“I went to meet him in the 1980s and recorded a series of remarkable conversations with him about his childhood, his love-hate relationship with his own name, his fractured family and the place his teddy bear – ‘the Best Bear in the World’ – had in his life. This is a book about fame and families, about how our childhoods can define our lives. It’s also the portrait of an extraordinary writer who lived a most unusual life.
“Winnie-the-Pooh has been part of our popular culture for 100 years, but I think there’s more to Pooh than that. He’s a literary icon, an icon of childhood, but there’s also something about him and his world (and his philosophy) that resonates with us in a very special way.”
Bunyard said: “Few have captured so brilliantly childhood friendship and adventure than Milne, and few are as capable of accessing the heart of human stories as Gyles. While Milne is undoubtedly one of the greatest chroniclers of childhood in the English language, he hasn’t until now enjoyed the same familiarity for his life. With his bestselling biography of the late Queen, Gyles crafted a more intimate portrait of the monarch than we’d previously seen; here, he tells a profoundly moving story with both depth and lightness of touch, producing the biography that Milne has long deserved.”
Signed copies will be available from Waterstones and independent bookstores.
