Restoration Heart
Little, Brown (Constable)
A story of love, double divorce and redemption with an Elizabethan house at its heart...
Following a romantically disastrous foray to the US in the 1990s, and two painful divorces, journalist-turned-publisher William Cash unexpectedly finds himself taking on the renovation of one of the oldest manor houses in Shropshire, Upton Cressett. Unfortunately, he is on his own: aged forty-three and without children. Both his house and heart are in need not just of ‘fixing up’ but salvation.
As William embarks on re-building his life and ruin of a country house, he starts looking again for love. But money, patience and the likelihood of ever finding family happiness soon start to run out.
Restoration Heart is a tempestuous, Gulliver-like voyage of the heart with a colourful cast of figures including Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Hurley, David Hockney, Piers Morgan, an American singer legend cousin and, most dramatically, a future possible prime minister.
Hilarious and poignant, this ‘restore-a-wreck’ memoir is an account of how an Englishman suffered a mid-life breakdown and was rescued by architecture and beauty.
The Critics
'I read most of it in one exciting sitting. It's brilliant, gripping and sad. The personal romantic memoir is terrific'
Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie
'It never fails to entertain, a compulsive and entertaining read'
Sir Roy Strong
"Hilarious....Restoration Heart conveys the transformative power of good architecture.. this book is one to be treasured"
The New Criterion (The Editors 'critic's pick') in New York
"Restoration Heart is buoyed by Cash's self-effacing humour. He puts his life - loves, losses, and longings - on display here and the result is a paean to hard-won optimism and an affirmation of the epistle as cherished form"
Nick Ripratzone, The Millions website (described by the New York Times as "the indispensable literary site")
"A funny and unexpectedly touching book"
Country Life
"A riotously colourful book"
Mail on Sunday
"Immensely readable... Laugh-out-loud funny, Restoration Heart is a delightful true story of love, hope and redemption by one of the foremost society writers of our day"
Tatler
"An excellent memoir"
Nicholas Coleridge,
Bestselling author and chairman of the V & A
'Recommended' by the New Statesman as a memoir of 'unexpected poignancy'
"This entertaining, often poignant book, is straight out of Waugh or Wodehouse"
Clare Asquith, Catholic Herald
"A touching, entertaining memoir which traces the twin track restoration of a broken heart and dilapidated Shropshire Manor"
Brendan Walsh, Editor, The Tablet
"An endearing story of rebuilding and restoring"
You magazine
"A good read"
Presenter Aasmah Mir, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Live
"A very amusing and candid memoir"
Jeremy Musson, architectural historian and broadcaster
"I'm very much enjoying Restoration Heart"
John Challis, aka Boycie from Only Fools and Horses
"Cash emerges as a classically English romantic ...Cash's transition is genuinely endearing. In this wry account of repeated ruined romances and of 'Money-Pit Manor', Cash evokes those gentle post-war Ealing comedies—though not so much Passport to Pimlico as a Sonnet to Shropshire"
Philippa Stockley, The Art Newspaper
"Wittilly recounted and moving... This book will surely give heart to anyone embarking on a seemingly Sisyphean restoration job, be it of the house or of the soul"
Mary Killen, The Lady
"William Cash’s Restoration Heart beats with humour, longing, resilience and a love of history and his place in the world. I count myself among his history, as a distant cousin, which is a source of great delight for both of us. The love of language and the search for beauty and redemption are hardwired into our Cash genes, and he writes about his particular search with great eloquence, and with sad but wry observations of his journey. I loved Restoration Heart, and I am certain that even those who are not ‘cousins' will love it as well"
Rosanne Cash,
Grammy award winning singer-songwriter and author, daughter of Johnny Cash
William Cash’s ‘Restoration Heart’ beats with humoor, longing, resilience and a love of history and his place in the world. I count myself among his history, as a distant cousin, which is a source of great delight for both of us. The love of language and the search for beauty and redemption are hardwired into our Cash genes, and he writes about his particular search with great eloquence, and with sad but wry observations of his journey. I loved ‘Restoration Heart’, and I am certain that even those who are not ‘cousins' will love it as well."
Rosanne Cash, Grammy award winning singer-songwriter and author, daughter of Johnny Cash
The Third Woman
The Secret Passion That Inspired The End of the Affair
(Little, Brown UK)
An intense tale of sexual betrayal, tortured religiosity, guilt, despair, jealous obsession and literary revenge.
When Graham Greene and Catherine Walston began their illicit romance in January, 1947, he was the acclaimed author of Brighton Rock with a troubled marriage, and she was the sexually libertine thirty year old wife of a millionaire and future Labour life peer. What followed would inspire Greene's 1951 novel,The End of the Affair. Revisiting the scenes of their adulterous passion, and drawing on love letters, diaries, personal interviews and correspondence, The Third Woman is the enthralling true story of one of the twentieth century's most epic literary romances.
The Critics
'A succinct masterpiece'
A.N Wilson, Evening Standard
'A remarkable achievement. Not only has Cash succeeded in piecing together an extraordinary story, but he has painted a vivid portrait of these two complex and fascinating people about whom he has uncovered some revealing new material. Most Crucially, Cash shows us a different side of Graham Greene, not the well known one of the detached observer with the splinter of ice in his heart but a man desperately in love....his eye for telling detail is acute'
Selina Hastings, The Spectator
'Compelling reading'
The Financial Times
'Fascinating to anybody interested in the relationship between Greene's art and life'
David Lodge, Times Literary Supplement
U.S Edition
The Third Woman was published in America by Carrol & Graf
The Critics
'The Third Woman provides hypnotic voyeuristic reading....William Cash offers us an erotic spiced with more than a little theology: Greene's passionate affair of many years with the beautiful American born Catherine Walston.'
The Atlantic Monthly
'A fascinating....biography of a love affair'
The New York Times
If this book is accurate (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), she was the great love of Graham Greene's life.....Cash is particularly interested in the relationship between fact and fiction: between Greene's novel about an an adulterous affair, 'The End of the Affair', and his real life fair with Catherine. Cash argues persuasively that their liaison was the inspiration for the novel...But at the same time he wisely insists that Walston and Greene are not the Sarah and Bendrix characters of the novel, and that the impact of Walston on Greene's creative life was much more subtle and pervasive.
Nina King, International Herald Tribune
'Cash's research gets as close to the heart of the matter as one can with the enigmatic Greene. For the novelist's fans, this is a necessary adjunct to biographies by Norman Sherry, W.J. West and Michael Sheldon'
Publishers Weekly (US)
Educating William: Memoirs of a Hollywood Correspondent
(Simon & Schuster)
The colourful and idiosyncratic story of a bookish young Englishman's real education in LA during the 1990s. Working for The Times, William Cash danced with Madonna, was jailed by Disneyland at Liz Taylor's 60th birthday, covered the LA riots from the safety of the Playboy Mansion, took David Hockney's Wagnerian Tour of the Santa Monica Mountains, power lunched with Jackie Collins and drank to much at dinner with Jay McInerney with disastrous results and observed the macabre pantomime of California's first execution in 25 years. In Educating William, Cash launched a radical and coruscating assault on the cult of celebrity and an irreverent but entertaining exposure of the dark side of the Tinseltown star system.
Witty, iconoclastic and well informed, this is the story of William Cash's adventures and encounters with LA's celebrity and cultural high and low life - a foreign correspondent's first two years in Hollywood when the European ex-pat lifestyle was similar to that of Kenya's Happy Valley set in the 1930s.
The Critics
'A very funny and well written opus about Hollywood'
The Spectator
'Cash's self-deprecation is a merciful relief from the horrors of the celebrity circus.. entertaining but unnerving... a thoroughly enjoyable book'
Literary Review
'Well-written... Cash is a vivid observer, industrious, enterprising and brave'
Sunday Times
Like episodes from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop... Cash writes well with a keen eye'
Sunday Express
'Fascinating despatches from a terminally creepy world'
Vogue
'Cash is a charming writer and Los Angeles, with its goofy citizens and eccentric habits, is a perfect foil. Most of the pages are genuine memoirs, rendered in a witty and sophisticated style'
Rob Long, executive producer of Cheers, and author of Conversations with my Agent, in The Modern Review