Event, Perhaps

Peter Salmon was born in Australia but now lives in the UK. his first novel, The Coffee Story (Sceptre, 2011), was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He has written for the Guardian, the Sydney Review of Books, the New Humanist, as well as Australian TV and radio. He has received Writer's Awards from the Arts Council of England and the Arts Council of Victoria, Australia. Formerly Centre Director of the John Osborne/The Hurst Arvon Centre (2006-2012), he also teaches creative writing, most recently at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Liverpool John Moores University.

This is a compulsively readable intellectual biography of Derrida that teases out his endlessly fascinating thought, even when it is at its knottiest, with admirable patience and lucidity. Salmon's book, in vividly transmitting the intellectual excitement of Derrida's times, reminds the reader that, especially in his thinking about ethics, he remains a philosopher who is urgently, politically relevant to our times too.