{"title":"Gully Wells","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"house-in-france-book-gully-wells-9781408808092","title":"The House in France","description":"In 2009, six years after her mother's death, Gully Wells returns to La Migoua, the house in Provence which belonged to her mother - the glamorous, funny, unpredictable and furiously rude American journalist, Dee Wells. Surrounded by the clutter of decades, Gully is taken back to her childhood, to her mother, her adored stepfather - the celebrated, brilliant, womanising Oxford philosopher, A. J. Ayer - and to the rich, sensual memories that the house evokes.  Gully's beautiful, rebellious mother Dee fled Boston when she was seventeen to join the Canadian Army, where she became a Sergeant Major. She married, had Gully, divorced and moved to London where she would meet, and fall madly in love with, the icon of logical positivism, Ayer, who she would later persuade to marry her. There they lived in an extraordinary, liberated and intellectual world, with friends and acquaintances including Bobby Kennedy, Mary Quant, Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Miller, George Melly and Bertrand Russell.  In the turbulent and vibrant milieu of sixties London, Gully develops from a cautious only child to a studious teenager. She has a childhood infatuation with the aristocratic homosexual Michael Pitt-Rivers, loses her virginity to a Provençal hairdresser and wins a scholarship to St Hilda's at Oxford, where she blossoms, studies French history under Theodore Zeldin, and falls in love with fellow student, Martin Amis. But as the affair ends, Gully moves on, explores love and travel, eventually settling down in New York.   La Migoua, perched on a hill above Bandol, halfway between Toulon and Marseilles, is inextricably woven into Gully's existence. Unsentimental and gloriously witty, The House in France is a vivid and moving love letter to a beloved mother, and a celebration of family, of growing up and of the spirit of a cherished house.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49503700058385,"sku":"GOR003331142","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50593120026897,"sku":"GOR003313675","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50716537815313,"sku":"GOR003735157","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1408808099.jpg?v=1751429002"},{"product_id":"house-in-france-book-gully-wells-9780307269805","title":"The House in France","description":"Set in Provence, London, and New York, this is a daughter's wonderfully evocative and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather--Dee Wells, the glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated and worldly Oxford philosopher--and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything. Gully Wells takes us into the heart of London's liberated intellectual inner circle of the 1960s. Here are Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Miller, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Kennedy, and later in New York, Mayor Lindsay and Mike Tyson, her mother as a television commentator earning a reputation for her outspoken style and progressive views, her stepfather--an icon in the world of twentieth-century philosophy--proving himself as prodigious a womanizer as he was a thinker. And throughout, there is La Migoua, the house in France, on a hill between Toulon and Marseilles, where her parents and their friends came together and where Gully herself learned some of the long-lasting lessons of a life well lived. This is a dazzling portrait of a woman who caught the spirit of the sixties and one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, drawn from the vivid memory of the child who adored them both.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49518369046801,"sku":"CIN0307269809A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50218478305553,"sku":"CIN0307269809G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50317104873745,"sku":"GOR005748113","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50330215874833,"sku":"CIN0307269809VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0307269809.jpg?v=1751430418"},{"product_id":"house-in-france-book-gully-wells-9781408822258","title":"The House in France","description":"A vivid, funny and moving memoir about growing up in an astonishing family; a love-letter to a mother and to an extraordinary house","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49532979544337,"sku":"GOR003886290","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49964445499665,"sku":"GOR004881364","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50374307283217,"sku":"CIN1408822253G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50490305642769,"sku":"GOR004836868","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50596856201489,"sku":"GOR011902910","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52707970122001,"sku":"NGR9781408822258","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1408822253.jpg?v=1751430664"},{"product_id":"house-in-france-book-gully-wells-9781408819883","title":"The House in France","description":"In 2009, six years after her mother's death, Gully Wells returns to La Migoua, the house in Provence which belonged to her mother - the glamorous, funny, unpredictable and furiously rude American journalist, Dee Wells. Surrounded by the clutter of decades, Gully is taken back to her childhood, to her mother, her adored stepfather - the celebrated, brilliant, womanising Oxford philosopher, A. J. Ayer - and to the rich, sensual memories that the house evokes.  Gully's beautiful, rebellious mother Dee fled Boston when she was seventeen to join the Canadian Army, where she became a Sergeant Major. She married, had Gully, divorced and moved to London where she would meet, and fall madly in love with, the icon of logical positivism, Ayer, who she would later persuade to marry her. There they lived in an extraordinary, liberated and intellectual world, with friends and acquaintances including Bobby Kennedy, Mary Quant, Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Miller, George Melly and Bertrand Russell.  In the turbulent and vibrant milieu of sixties London, Gully develops from a cautious only child to a studious teenager. She has a childhood infatuation with the aristocratic homosexual Michael Pitt-Rivers, loses her virginity to a Provençal hairdresser and wins a scholarship to St Hilda's at Oxford, where she blossoms, studies French history under Theodore Zeldin, and falls in love with fellow student, Martin Amis. But as the affair ends, Gully moves on, explores love and travel, eventually settling down in New York.   La Migoua, perched on a hill above Bandol, halfway between Toulon and Marseilles, is inextricably woven into Gully's existence. Unsentimental and gloriously witty, The House in France is a vivid and moving love letter to a beloved mother, and a celebration of family, of growing up and of the spirit of a cherished house.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49557056618769,"sku":"GOR004039083","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1408819880.jpg?v=1751432794"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-gully-wells.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}