Description

‘Smith’s eye for life’s everyday transcendence rarely fails her’ Sunday Times, ‘Books of the Year’
‘A triumph’ Joseph O’Connor, Irish Times, ‘Books of the Year’
‘Quietly sacred, utterly beautiful’ Service95

A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award Winner Just Kids.

God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies.

The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.

She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.

As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again – the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

Publisher Review

Quietly sacred, utterly beautiful * Service 95 * The post-pandemic flood of artist memoirs continues, but Patti Smith stands apart... you see the rebel artist being born in stop-motion...The narrative is radiant and intimate... A transcendent sequence that follows - like those moments in her songs when poetic incantation takes flight - displays her eccentric writing style not as a tic but a superpower... She sang herself into being. She's written - is still writing - her own story * Guardian * Reads more like a gospel or a beat prose-poem than a conventional autobiography ... Smith is acutely aware of being part of a dying breed, those who grew up outdoors, devoured books - and fell in love. At a time when love has never been so undervalued, when "boyfriends are embarrassing", according to Vogue, when the union of two humans is mere content, it is lovely to read about love as sacred. Smith, once again, shows us a better way to be ourselves * Evening Standard * Just Kids is the memoir we've name-checked as a favourite read for the last 15 years, but just wait until you've sunk your teeth into Patti Smith's latest Bread of Angels. From her postwar childhood to becoming a rock icon and poet, she reflects on art, love and resilience in her most intimate memoir to date * Elle * Her greatest creation - the idea of what an artist should be - will live on for decades yet * The Times * In her lyrical, moving memoir Bread of Angels rock goddess Patti Smith tells the story of how she 'found her voice' - both the singing and writing kind * Independent * A fantastic read - a portrait of an artist who was at the heart of New York's counter-cultural scene in the 1970s... a warm and thoughtful person, with an intense aesthetic sensibility and a - just as intense - love of family. Her losses have shaped her. Her poetic artistry has shaped us all * BBC * Poetic and immersive [...] Bread of Angels is both a prequel and a sequel to the bestselling Just Kids [...] from 'rock's renaissance woman' * i Paper * Smith's evocative memoir of life at the forefront of the bohemian music scene is imbued with her customary lyricism and unwavering cool * Waterstones *