Everything we sell has been donated to St Joseph's Hospice by our generous supporters.

All the money raised will come directly to the Hospice so we can continue to provide our care across east London.

See Photos. About Time is a clean Hardback Book in very good condition, however first inside page has been removed, slight ripple to the top of the dust jacket. Then Again is a clean paperback, some pages have creases

Two Irma Kurtz Books

Then Again Paperback 2004

About Time Hardback 2009

Then Again: 

Travels in search of my younger self

Fourth Estate Paperback First Edition 2004

9781841156941

For fans of Lorna Sage and Paula Fox, a unique memoir from Irma Kurtz, the acclaimed author of ‘The Great American Bus Ride’ and internationally renowned agony aunt.

"A girl of indisputable gifts, she should of course use them someday to make a beautiful home and raise a family in elegant surroundings…" School psychologist's report on Irma Kurtz, 1950.

In 1954 eighteen-year-old Irma Kurtz left New Jersey to travel across Europe, intent on transforming herself and changing the world. She looked to the Old World for an alternative destiny to that mapped out by the traditional expectations at home. On her post-war Grand Tour she found what she believed in: Art and Culture and Beauty and Love, and some horror as a Jewish girl encountering the seat of much of her family's destruction.

Years later, sifting through a cardboard box filled with memories at her mother's house, she rediscovered the journal of her first journey, the one that marked the beginning of a life of writing and living abroad. Gripped by intense recollections of sailing across the Atlantic, and intrigued by the exuberant remarks of her adventurous younger self, she decided to leave her London home and retrace her footsteps, this time with herself as a guide.

Testing her theory that older women are invisible, Kurtz's journey is peppered with acute observations of human behaviour, not to mention some sharp advice for her ghostly travel companion, a teenager who thinks she knows it all, yet is blind to what lies ahead of her. Part-memoir, part-travelogue, this unique book contrasts the experience of two very different travellers, offering an insight into what has endured, and what has been lost, in the life of one woman and the altered environment of Europe at the dawn of a new millennium.

Beautifully written, moving and funny, Then Again is time-travel at its best, revealing the pains and pleasures of growing older and wiser.

About Time 

Growing Old Disgracefully

John Murray Hardback 2009

9781848540231

Something in our world is changing. In ten years time 60% of us will be over 55. The retirement age is likely to move up to 70; modern medicine ensures that most of us will live well in to our 80s and most of us will choose to do some work, paid or voluntary, while we are still physically able. Yet older people have, as yet, no role in modern society. Old age is regarded as an invonvenience, something to be shunned and set apart from our daily lives.

In this frank, often funny and always compelling disquisition on ageing, Irma Kurtz sets out to chart the territory through her own and others’ experiences. Along the way she meets a diverse group of people whose insights into their own lives have much to offer a younger generation – from a 90-year-old weekly columnist and a vicar still working in his mid-70s to The Good Granny Guide‘s Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall and ‘London’s Rudest Landlord’, Normal Balon of the celebrated Coach and Horses. Kurtz is a fearless investigator of the art of growing old – its pleasures and its griefs – carrying with her the only tool that sharpens with age: lifelong curiosity.