Promotional Information

Originally published in 2000 to international acclaim, The Last Samurai is a paean to the power of language and learning - dazzling, delighting and inspiring a legion of readers

About the Author

Daughter of an American diplomat, Helen DeWitt was born in a suburb of Washington, D.C. in 1957 and grew up in Latin America. Abandoning a degree at Smith College, she went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1979 to study classics. A Senior Scholarship at Brasenose College enabled her to get a DPhil and discover Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa and Mel Brooks. She left academia in 1988 to write a novel; she had 100 unfinished novels on her hard drive when The Last Samurai was published in 2000 to international acclaim. Her second novel, Lightning Rods, was published in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. She has contributed installations to Artists Space in New York and was resident and participant in the Plastic Words series at Raven Row in London. In descending order of proficiency she knows Latin, Ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese. She is based in Berlin.

Reviews

Her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful… What grounds all DeWitt’s brilliance and game-playing is the way that she dramatizes a certain kind of hyperintelligent rationalism and probes its irregular distribution of blindness and insight…a wonderfully funny book, but comedy dances near the abyss; the apprehension of humor’s frailty links DeWitt to the tragicomic tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Nabokov
*New Yorker*

Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read
*Mark Haddon*

A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form
*A. S. Byatt*

A bold, brilliant book…original both in content and form… DeWitt’s zeal cannot fail to enchant
*Guardian*

An exhilaratingly literate and playful first novel by a fresh, electrifying talent. DeWitt goes to the top of the class...her adventurousness spins out on an epic scale
*New York Times*

A brilliant debut novel...keeps things moving at an exhilarating clip... DeWitt is formidably intelligent but engagingly witty
*Washington Post*

Destined to become a classic
*Garth Risk Hallberg*

The Last Samurai is an original work of brilliance about, in part, the limits of brilliance. And in literature as in life, DeWitt understands that what we like most of all is a good yarn
*Time*

You walk into a book due to an Akira Kurosawa link and your fondness for the great film-maker. You walk out, staggered by the book's originality and bravery... It should be read by everyone
*Irish Times*

I adored this crazy, fabulous, lovable book… This really does deserve to be a modern classic
*The Pool*