You've Had Your Time: The Second Part of the Confessions

Burgess returned home to England from Malaya in 1959 to a medical diagnosis that he had less than a year to live. He turned himself into a ``busy hack'' to earn royalties for his wife Lynne, whose suicide attempt and subsequent death from alcoholic cirrhosis left him with deep-seated guilt. His hectic writing life, ``an agony mitigated by drink,'' was uplifted in 1968 when he married his Italian mistress Liana Macellari, who had borne him a son five years earlier. With disarming candor and coruscating wit, the prolific novelist-critic discusses his distaste for the Beatles and the swinging '60s, the writing and filming of A Clockwork Orange , his peripatetic existence from Singapore to Manhattan, the ordeal of teaching and a roller-coaster career that often left him ``too much in the paws of producers and directors.'' While it lacks the soul-searching urgency of his first autobiographical installment Little Wilson and Big God , this self-portrait is nevertheless a joy to read. (May)