In Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings Craig Brown chronicles the encounters of famous people. What makes the book so interesting, aside from the fact that it’s all true, is the way the stories are linked. In one section Person A will meet Person B. In the next, Person B will have a chance encounter with Person C.
The book starts and ends with Adolf Hitler. In between are people like Madonna, Nancy Reagan, Salvador Dali, Sigmund Freud and a slew of others. I was happy to note that there are numerous writers included in the book. Some of the authors included are Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
Hello Goodbye Hello is a daisy chain of 101 fascinating true encounters, a book that has been hailed by reviewers in London as “howlingly funny” (The Spectator), “original and a complete delight” (The Sunday Times), and “rich and hugely enjoyable” (The Guardian). Or, as the London Evening Standard put it, “the truth and nothing but the plain, bonkers, howling truth . . . It is partly a huge karmic parlour game, partly a dance to the music of chaos—and only the genius of Craig Brown could have produced it.”