Based on actual events, NEVER ANYONE BUT YOU is the gripping, beautifully written story of a love affair between two revolutionary female artists who challenged the conventions of art and gender during the long twentieth century.
'A moving story of love, difference and defiance' Mail on Sunday
When Suzanne, a shy 17-year-old, meets the brilliant but troubled Lucie in rural Provence at the turn of the twentieth century, the two young women embark on a clandestine love affair. But they soon long for greater freedom.
The lovers move to Paris where they recreate themselves entirely, adopting the gender-neutral names Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Before long, they are mixing in the most glamorous social circles and producing art of great power and strangeness.
But the world is fast darkening around them. With war looming they leave Paris for Jersey, and it is here that they confront their destiny, dreaming up a campaign of propaganda against Hitler's occupying forces that places them in great danger and demands their love endure against ever greater odds.
From one of our most celebrated writers, Never Anyone but You explores the gripping true story of two extraordinary women who smashed gender boundaries, redefining what it means to be a woman, and ultimately risked their lives to overcome oppression. Theirs is a story that has been hidden in the margins of history - until now...
'A beautiful and extraordinary book . . . It's a long time since I read a love story quite so convincing and truthful' Philip Pullman
'A taut, magnificently controlled novel about creativity and personal survival' Guardian
'Sensitively realised but hugely powerful' Daily Mail
In this novel about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Rupert Thomson tells the thrilling story of how, fusing love and art, one of the great collaborative partnerships of the 20th century mounted an unthinkably brave, largely unsung campaign of political witness and resistance. The voice Thomson gives Marcel is a brilliant invention: flashes of poetry trouble the patina of its self-control, intimations of the wildness and terror of genius.
