-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
In this exquisite memoir, Antonia Fraser recounts the life she shared with the internationally renowned dramatist Harold Pinter. In essence, it is a love story and a marvelously insightful account of their years together, beginning with their initial meeting when Fraser was the wife of a member of Parliament and mother of six, and Pinter was married to a distinguished actress. Over the years, they experienced much joy, a shared devotion to their work, crises and laughter, and, in the end, great courage and love as Pinter battled the illness to which he eventually succumbed on Christmas Eve 2008.
Must You Go? is based on Fraser's recollections and on the diaries she has kept since October 1968. She shares Pinter's own revelations about his past, as well as observations by his friends. Fraser's diaries--written by a biographer living with a creative artist and observing the process firsthand--also provide a unique insight into his writing.
Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser lived together from August 1975 until his death thirty-three years later. "O! call back yesterday, bid time return," cries one of the courtiers to Richard II. This is Antonia Fraser's uniquely compelling way of doing so.
"This is a wonderful testament to romance, love, shared humor, and true partnership." - Library Journal
"A moving compilation of diary entries written during the course of an artistically fruitful three-decade partnership...A devoted, respectful tribute." - Kirkus Reviews
"This book — full of funny and tender things — satisfies on more than one level. It is an intimate account of the life and habits of a major artist; it is a pencil sketch of British high society in the second half of the 20th century; and it is, more than either of these things, and much more unusually, a wonderfully full description of the deep pleasures and comforts of married love." - Spectator (UK)
"Must You Go? is extraordinary by any standards. Based on the diaries she kept during her 33-year relationship with the dramatist, it is simultaneously a love story, an intimate portrait of a great writer and an exercise in self-revelation." - The Guardian (UK)
"Neither autobiography nor biography but a love story, romantic, poignant and very funny, illuminating her husband's character and creativity." - The Times
"[Writing] with exemplary clarity and courage ... Fraser keeps her gaze steady and her heart open." - The Independent (UK)
"Unremittingly delicious: strange, rarefied, frequently hilarious." - The Observer (UK)
"[Must You Go? is] told from a privileged backstage perspective, and observed with a sharp eye for social and behavioural detail ... This book works, just as it appears their lives worked, as the most touching and enduring of love stories ... The ending, brutal and unsentimentally presented yet filled with a Tolstoyan directness of feeling, is almost unbearably moving. The whole of this lovely book fills you with a gratitude that happenstance can, once in a while, not screw up and find the right girl for the right boy." - Financial Times (UK)
This information about Must You Go? was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Since 1969 Antonia Fraser has written nine acclaimed historical works which have been international best-sellers. She began with Mary Queen of Scots (1969) and followed it with Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (1973) and Charles II (1979). Three books featuring women's history came next: The Weaker Vessel; Woman's Lot in the Seventeenth Century (1984); The Warrior Queens (1988) and The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1992). A study in religious extremism, The Gunpowder Plot: Terror And Faith in 1605 (1996) was followed by two books set at the court of Versailles: Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001) and Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (2006).
Antonia Fraser has also written eight crime novels and two books of short stories featuring Jemima Shore Investigator. ...
If you liked Must You Go?, try these:
by Jacqueline Woodson
Published 2025
Winner: BookBrowse YA Book Award 2023
National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson brings readers a powerful story that delves deeply into life's burning questions about time and memory and what we take with us into the future.
Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted
by Ben Okri
Published 2025
In this modern fable with the impish magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a masked ball makes two upper-class British couples see each other in a new light.
A wise, enchanting novel about love, power, and our many selves—past and future, public and private—from the Booker Prize–winning author.
by Megan Angelo
Published 2020
An electrifying story of two ambitious friends, the dark choices they make and the profound moment that changes the meaning of privacy forever.
At times, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
