After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933Mr Norris Changes Trainspiquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

Christopher Isherwood was born at High lane, Cheshire, in 1904. He left Cambridge without graduationg, tried briefly to study medicine and in 1928 publishedAll the Conspirators, followed by a second novel,The Memorialin 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) andGoodbye 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 inthe Evening,Down There on a Visit,A Single ManandA Meeting by the River; a travel book about South America,The Condor and the Cows; andRamakrishna and his Disciples, a biography of the great Indian mystic.

In 1971 he publishedKathleen and Frank, a book based on the correspondence of his parents and his mother's diary, in 1977Christopher and his Kind, an autobiographical account of the years 1929 to 1939, and in 1980My Guru and His Disciple, the story of his friendship with the Swami Prabhavananda. He died in 1986.

Isherwood's immortal novel about political high-tension, passion and literary talent in 1930s Berlin