Sybil & Cyril: Cutting through Time

Jenny Uglow

Hardcover | 15.3 x 3 x 23.4 cm | 416 pp

Faber & Faber | 2021 | 9780571354153

In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts, streamlined, full of movement and brilliant colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight.

Cyril & Sybil traces their struggles and triumphs, conflicts and dreams, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.

'Whatever Uglow writes about she makes absolutely fascinating.' DIANA ATHILL

'In all her books, she makes us feel the life behind the facts.' GUARDIAN

'Wonderfully sharp and sympathetic...Uglow is a perfect biographer.' CRAIG BROWN, MAIL ON SUNDAY