Sybille Bedford’s evocative semi-autobiographical novel walks the fine line between memory and fiction as it recreates a lost time and place.

Jigsaw is set in the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story of her scholar-gipsy childhood and of her many teachers, beginning with her father, a pleasure-loving German baron, and her brilliant, beautiful, erratic mother. Later, on the Mediterranean coast of France, she meets the artists and intellectuals who will show her the way to a life’s work in literature, among them Aldous and Maria Huxley.

Shortlisted
The Booker Prize 1989
Published by
Hamish Hamilton
Publication date
Sybille Bedford

Sybille Bedford

About the Author

Sybille Bedford was born in Charlottenburg, Germany. She published her first book, The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey, in 1953.
More about Sybille Bedford