Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare (Vintage £7.99 in UK)

In his life, work, and sexuality, writer Bruce Chatwin continually reinvented himself. Facts were presented as fiction, as in his short novel set in Prague, Utz; fiction as facts, as in sections of In Patagonia and The Songlines. He was married to the same woman for all his adult life, and he also had numerous affairs with men. He went from working in Sotheby's to being an archaeology student, then a Sunday Times journalist, then essayist, travel writer - In Patagonia redefined the travel book genre - and novelist, travelling around the globe all the while. Even the AIDS which killed him in 1989 was presented to the public as a rare fungal bone disease picked up on his travels in China. His extraordinary life was short, but it was crammed with ideas, lovers, books, projects, friends, and places. As Robert Hughes commented, Chatwin "wasn't a person, he was a scrum". Nicholas Shakespeare was eight years researching and writing this superb biography, which took him to those places to which Chatwin had travelled, and for which he has extensively interviewed family and friends. Like all truly great biographies, it is as much a meditation on the bigger life picture as the person it profiles. Chatwin emerges as a deeply selfish and self-serving man with a monstrous ego, yet as a person who was loved by many, and a fabulous storyteller who had a mind like a box of treasure. This biography is hugely exciting to read, guaranteed to draw the reader back to reread Chatwin's books, and is infused throughout with unforgettable vignettes.