The Beautiful Ones

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time, in his own words - featuring the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death.
Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of 'Uptown' to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of 'Paisley Park'. But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era.

The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince - a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The audiobook is told in four parts. The first is composed of the memoir Prince was writing before his tragic death, which brings us into his childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us through Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album was released, via an evocative scrapbook of Prince’s writing. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution, going up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the audiobook’s fourth section: his original treatment for Purple Rain - the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, where he retells the autobiography of the first three parts as a heroic journey.

The audiobook is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final months - a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated.

This work is not just a tribute to an icon, but an original and energising literary work in its own right, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image - his undying gift to the world.

Critics Review

The Beautiful Ones is a splendidly produced book… and if we are only to have fragments, then these are the very best ones to have: childhood, his complex relationship with his handsome father… and his beautiful complicated mother Mattie… this book is a fun glance, a tiny bolt from what now feels like a very distant past, and will leave you feeling nothing but huge affection for little, brilliant Skipper.

The Spectator

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