Acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon will be at Cape Town’s Kalk Bay Bookshop tomorrow, Tuesday 11 November, for the launch of her memoir DIVIDED LIVES. She will be in conversation with Ann Donald at 18.00, before taking questions and signing copies. She will also be appearing at Gorry Bowes-Taylor’s Literary Lunch on Saturday 15 November, with various radio and magazine interviews throughout the week. On Sunday she will give a talk at 16:00 at the Gitlin Library in Gardens and next week on Thursday 20 November The Book Lounge will hold an evening launch in central Cape Town, where she will be in conversation with Karina Szczurek.

Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town, to a mother whose mysterious illness confined her for years to life indoors. Lyndall was her carer, her “secret sharer”, a child who grew to know life through books, story-telling and her mother's own writings. Moving and beautiful, DIVIDED LIVES is a poetic memoir about the pain and joy of being a daughter, and also an intriguing social history and feminist text, rich in literary reference.

Lyndall Gordon is also the prize-winning author of literary biographies of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brönte, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry James and T.S. Eliot. All of these biographies are published in the UK by Virago.

Praise for DIVIDED LIVES:

‘A wonderful – and at times painful – memoir about the expectations of love and duty between mother and daughter.’ – The Bookseller, Editor’s Picks

‘A biographer with soul, she reaches into the hearts of those she brings alive for us. She makes the meaning of their lives sing and sweat as she invites us into their experiences, their longings, their struggles and their disappointments. In preparation, she has learnt the anguish and the heartbeat of another, the other, her mother, Rhoda, whose presence rules the pages of this memoir. …In this fascinating mix between memoir and biography, we see the struggle of a daughter, to keep an attachment with her mother that is both close and yet boundaried, separate and connected, an attachment in which each can live their dreams.’ – Susie Orbach, The Observer

'This quietly devastating book takes us into many strange terrains... one of our most sensitive writers.' – Frances Wilson, Mail on Sunday