New Release: An Education, the inspiration for the award-winning film

You’ve seen the movie, now read the book. I can give this advice without irony in regard to Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education, which we’ve just published this month. The movie is great, we all agree. It’s been nominated for lots of awards, including the Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Globes, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the handsome Peter Sarsgaard or the stunning Carey Mulligan clutching an Oscar. (And wouldn’t it be cool if Nick Hornby, the Bad Boy of the London literary scene, won for Best Screenplay?) But when I got my hands on the book, which was published in England last year to great critical acclaim, I was surprised to discover how much more there was to it than the story of a bookish adolescent seduced—and “educated”—by an older man. The memoir, by the fearsome journalist Lynn Barber, whose acerbic profiles have made the teeth of the chattering classes chatter, tells her story from beginning to . . . well, not end, but what is now tactfully called late middle age. Along the way are stints at Penthouse and (ill-fatedly) Vanity Fair; cameo appearances on a TV show called Grumpy Old Women; and a complex marriage that endures. It’s a classic British memoir, and we’re proud to bring it to an American audience.