A fascinating journey into the life of H.G. Wells, from one of Britain's best biographers

How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction?

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. The sudden success of The Time Machine and The War of The Worlds transformed his life and catapulted him to international fame; he became the writer who most inspired Orwell and countless others, and predicted men walking on the moon seventy years before it happened.

In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today.

'Claire Tomalin is my favourite biographer and I'm desperate to get my hands on her latest, The Young H. G. Wells' Elizabeth Day

'The finest of biographers' Hilary Mantel

'A most intelligent and sympathetic biographer' Daily Telegraph

'One of the best biographers of her generation' Guardian

'A deft and informative account which brings its subject vividly to life' TLS

'Richly informative... Tomalin admits that, although she set out to write about the young Wells, she has followed him into his forties because she found him 'too interesting to leave'. The same can be said of her book' Sunday Times