Goodbye to Berlin is a short novel by Christopher Isherwood. It is often published together with The Last of Mr. Norris in a collection called The Berlin Stories.
The novel, a semiautobiographical account of Isherwood's time in 1930s Berlin, describes pre-Nazi Germany and the people he met.
Moving to Germany to work on his novel, Isherwood soon becomes involved with many different German citizens: The caring landlady, Frau. Shroeder; the "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles, a young English woman who sings in the local Cabaret; Natalia Laundauer, the rich, Jewish heiress of a prosperous family business; Peter and Otto, a couple struggling to accept their relationship in light of the rise of the Nazis.
The book, first published in 1939, ironically highlights the groups of people who would be most at risk from Nazi intimidation.

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life: the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself.

'The best prose writer in English' - Gore Vidal. Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, "A Single Man" is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. 'A virtuoso piece of work...courageous...powerful' - "Sunday Times".

First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires--this is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am A Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret; Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught between the Nazis and the Communists; plump Fräulein Schroeder, who thinks an operation to reduce the scale of her Büste might relieve her heart palpitations; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers.

First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy with its mobs and millionaires. The shadow of Hitler looms menacingly, towering higher and higher. Goodbye to Berlin is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable and “divinely decadent” Sally Bowles; plump Fraülein Schroeder, who considers reducing her Büste to relieve heart palpitations; Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling with their relationship; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family the Landauers.

In this brilliantly perceptive novel, a middle aged professor living in California, is alienated from his students by differences in age and nationality, and from the rest of society by his homosexuality. Isherwood explores the depths of the human soul and its ability to triumph over loneliness, alienation and loss.

First published in 1933, the novel portrays a series of encounters in Berlin between the narrator and the camp and mildly sinister Mr. Norris. Evoking the atmosphere in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, the novel has achieved the status of a modern classic.

First published in 1980, Isherwood’s overlooked last book is central to an understanding of his life and work.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW
In 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk, who will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. Late-night drinking sessions, free love, and the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios alternate with meditation, abstinence and the study of religious texts in a compelling tug of war between worldliness and holiness.

A deeply satisfying novel of sibling rivalry, sexuality and spirituality.
Breaking a long silence Oliver, a young Englishman, writes to his elder brother, Patrick. Oliver, the idealistic younger brother is living in a Hindu Monastery and has decided to take his final monastic vows. Patrick, a successful publisher and a married man with a skeleton in his cupboard, decides to visit Oliver to persuade him not renounce the world.
First published in 1967, A Meeting by the River delicately depicts the complexity of sibling relationships and dramatizes the conflict between sexuality and spirituality.

First published in 1949, this is a lively memoir of Isherwood's South American travels
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PICO IYER
In September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and William Caskey left for a six-month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. The Condor and the Cows is Isherwood’s unsentimental and wonderfully rich account of that journey, during which he bumped into a handful of old acquaintances on a brand-new continent.

First published in 1971, this is a key book in Isherwood's career revealing as much about him as the parents he set out to portray.
This is the story of Christopher Isherwood’s parents – their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father’s death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

Isherwood's witty first foray into autobiographical fiction recalls the post-war dissolution of traditional English families.
The First World War is over. Eric Vernon is on the cusp of adulthood. Tall, bony and awkward he finds himself torn between a desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice, and resentment toward his father's roguish friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin. With subtle wit and trademark irony, Isherwood's second novel evokes a society in flux.

This title features with an introduction James Fenton. Subtitled "An education in the twenties", this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London's Bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Isherwood's contemporaries Auden, Upward, and Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.

The best prose writer in English’ Gore Vidal
At a party in the Hollywood Hills, Stephen Monk finds his wife in the arms of another man. Betrayed and furious, he packs his belongings and returns to the home he was born in. There he begins to retrace the steps that have brought him to this crisis. He is reminded of his own betrayals and weaknesses. But most of all, the memory of his lost love, Elizabeth Rydal, haunts him. Can he forgive his wife, and most importantly, himself?

A classic novel about the golden age of film.
It is based on Isherwood's experience of co-writing the 1934 Berthold Viertel film Little Friend.
'A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence' Edmund Wilson
An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry. Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of a sentimental love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet . In the real Vienna of 1934 the Austrian Right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught and his prophecy of the coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project.

Four narrators, all known as 'Christopher Isherwood', in different locations and periods of time, paint portraits of their own private sexual hells
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP HENSHER
'Radiant with observation, never wasting a word, funny and sympathetic' Stephen Spender
Berlin, the Greek Islands, London and California. 1928, 1932, 1988 and 1940. Four portraits, four settings, four narrators, all known as 'Christopher Isherwood'; all connected through their own experiences of private sexual hell. Often regarded as the best of his novels, Down There on a Visit tells the vivid stories of Isherwood's life that, together with the Berlin Stories, were to have comprised his great unfinished epic novel.
'May be the best Christopher Isherwood has written. A deeply intelligent and quietly compelling story' New York Times

"Mr Norris Changes Trains": The first of Christopher Isherwood's classic 'Berlin' novels, this portrays the encounter and growing friendship between young William Bradshaw and the urbane and mildly sinister Mr Norris. Piquant, witty and oblique, it vividly evokes the atmosphere of pre-war Berlin, and forcefully conveys an ironic political parable. "Goodbye to Berlin": The inspiration for the stage and screen musical Cabaret and for the play "I Am a Camera", this novel remains one of the most powerful of the century, a haunting evocation of the gathering storm of the Nazi terror. Told in a series of wry, detached and impressionistic vignettes, it is an unforgettable portrait of bohemian Berlin - a city and a world on the very brink of ruin.