Winner of the RNA Romantic Film of the Year Award 2010.

A coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in 1960s suburban London, and how her life changes with the arrival of a playboy nearly twice her age.

An Education has been made into a film by BBC Films and starring Carey Mulligan & Peter Sarsgaard.

Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 12 November 2009.

Synopsis

Lynn Barber's true story is now a major film of the same name scripted by Nick Hornby. At 16, Lynn Barber was an ambitious schoolgirl working towards a place at Oxford, when she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man in a sports car. So began a relationship that almost wrecked her life. Barber's fascinating memoir takes us beyond this bizarre episode, revealing how it left her with an abiding mistrust of men which paradoxically led her to a promiscuous life-style at university until she met her husband-to-be.

An Education tells how she went on to work for seven years at daring (for the times) men's magazine Penthouse' before beginning her starry days as the Demon Barber - Britain's most entertaining and most feared interviewer. The book ends with an extraordinarily moving account of the early death of her husband. Her writing is refreshingly frank and funny.

About the Author

Lynn Barber was born in Bagshot in 1944 and read English at Oxford. She worked at Penthouse magazine for seven years and then at the Sunday Express, the Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, the Daily Telegraph and now at the Observer. She has won five British Press Awards and a What the Papers Say award. Her books include How to Improve Your Man in Bed and The Single Woman's Sex Book, as well as a study of Victorian naturalists, The Heyday of Natural History. A previous collection of her interviews, Mostly Men, was published in 1991. She is married, with two daughters, and lives in Highgate, London. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation