After the Cabaret

In 1940, Sally Bowles, that spirited character from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, decides to leave her baby daughter with her parents in the country and return to London. There, despite the Blitz, she is determined to live life to the full. Moreover, she wants to find the love of her life, the elusive Theo.

Despite Theo’s absence, Sally cuts swathes across the cold, charmless, and secretive trio of Briggs, Pym, and Bruno. In the late 1990s, young American academic Greg Peters is trying to piece together the missing links of Sally’s life for a new biography.

He contacts Bruno in London and finds a man tauntingly evasive, knowledgeable but unwilling to comment. But eventually Bruno thaws, leading Greg on a fascinating and tantalizing trail of snippets, facts, and fantasies about the real Sally Bowles.

Hilary Bailey is a British writer and editor, born in 1936. She is the author of a biography of Vera Brittain, she edited volumes 7-10 of the ’New Worlds Quarterly’ series and among her varied works are 19 books of fiction, including famously Mrs Rochester, the sequel to Jane Eyre and most recently, Fifty- First State (2008).

She has just completed her latest book, and is now working on a drama, with Leonora Rose-Aqotu, centred on the life of Caribbean slave, Mary Prince.