Cast in the form of an autobiography, The Undiscovered Country tells the story of the intimate relationship between the narrator, Julian, and his boyhood friend Charles Humphries, a brilliant but erratic young man who fascinates Julian with his strange dark looks and his superior sophistication. “Our lives were so close,” confesses Julian, “that they are, to me, almost inextricable.” And indeed, one of the puzzles the author poses is whether Charles is a creature of Julian’s imagination or a part of his own self, his alter ego.

A witty and unsettling novel that explores the ambivalent relationship between art and reality, fact and fiction, satire and sentimentality, The Undiscovered Country is a brilliantly inventive tour de force, deserving all its comparisons to the work of Nabokov, Huxley and Borges.

‘Wryly funny, compellingly readable, skilfully devised. The talk is predominant, scintillating and probing as in the best of Aldous Huxley’s novels, and catching, as they did, the exact social and intellectual tone of its time.’

The Times


Julian's adaptation of Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier will run at the The Theatre Royal, Bath from 14th July to 14th August 2010.

The playscript of The Good Soldier will be published by Oberon Books.

Julian Mitchell - Julian Mitchell was born in 1935 and educated at Winchester and Oxford. In addition to five other novels, he has written successful plays for the stage, among them Another Country, filmed from his own script, and many other scripts for television and film, including Wilde.

Julian has curated an art exhibition called The Wye Tour and its Artists which is running at Chepstow Museum until September 5th 2010.

Margaret Drabble - Margaret Drabble has published seventeen novels, most recently The Sea Lady (2006) and biographies of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995). She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd and lives in London and Somerset.

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