Mr Norris Changes Trains - Softcover

First published in 1933, Mr Norris Changes Trains portrays a series of encounters in Berlin in the early thirties between the narrator, William Bradshaw, and the camp mildly sinister Mr Norris. Piquantly evocative of the atmosphere of the Nazis to power, it is a novel that has achieved the status of a modern classic, combining a vivid portrayal of people and places with the forcefulness of an ironic political parable.

Christopher Isherwood was born at High Lane, Cheshire, in 1904. He left Cambridge without graduating tried briefly to study medicine and in 1928 published All the Conspirators, followed by a second novel, The Memorial, in 1932. From 1928 onwards he lived mostly out of England: four years in Berlin, five in various European countries, including Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Denmark. In 1939 he went to California, which became his home for the rest of his life. His Berlin experiences produced two novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939)

Isherwood worked with the American Friends Service Committee during part of the war. In 1946 he became a US citizen. Following his move to America he wrote five novels - Prater Violet, The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man and A Meeting by the River; a travel book about South America, The Condor and the Cows; and Ramakrishna and His Disciples, a biography of the great Indian mystic.

In 1971 he published Kathleen and Frank, a book based on the correspondence of his parents, and his mother's diary, in 1977 Christopher and His Kind, an autobiographical account of the years 1929 to 1939, and in 1980 My Guru and His Disciple, the story of his friendship with Swami Prabhavananda.

He died in January 1986.