Athill's debut, and a modern classic memoir: a moving story of love and loss, heartbreak and hope during the second world war.

Despite her family's ailing finances, Diana Athill's childhood - spent in a lovely house in Norfolk - was blissful. In 1932, she fell in love with Paul: an undergraduate who tutored her younger brother. Within several years, she had moved to Oxford to study and they were engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. Athill's debut is also her most personal: a dissection of personal tragedy and the struggle to rebuild her life amid severe disappointment and loneliness. Unfolding throughout the Second World War, Instead of a Letter is an inspiring story of love and loss, heartbreak and hope, and a testament to her strength of character - her vivacity, honesty and perspicacity.

"Her first and still most perfect perfect book" - Literary Review

"The reader sees the transformation of the battered soul into a buoyant woman, open-minded and open-hearted" - Spectator

"This classic memoir ... well deserves another airing" - Daily Mail

"I first came across Diana Athill when I was 17. I picked up her memoir, Instead of a Letter, attracted to its title. I was driven on by avid inexperience, sure that I could find out from Athill what life itself was not yet ready to tell me about love, sex and - most impressively - heartbreak. I admired her elegant vigour and control of words in contrast to the freedom with which she wrote about herself. She became, in my reading life, a friend" - Observer

"One certainly admires both her and this truly excellent book, which is a masterpiece of confessional literature" - Tablet

"The documentary of one woman's ordinary and yet, in her telling, wholly extraordinary life" - The Times

"A model mix of clear-eyed analysis and deep, unashamed feeling" - Sunday Times