Amy, 27 - Softcover

HOWARD SOUNES is the author of several well-known non-fiction works, including the noted biographies Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, and Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. He is also the author of Seventies, a history of the arts in that decade, and the true-crime bestseller Fred & Rose. His books are also published in the U.K. and the U.S., and in twenty-two foreign languages. Sounes appears regularly on radio and television in connection with his subjects. He lives in London, England.

Fans of Amy and of the host of music stars who met their end too soon will find much to enthrall them here. Stylist Much of the book's power lies in its refusal to pander to the romantic-melancholy notion of the tortured young artist who lives fast and dies young. Instead the squalor and chaos of their everyday existence if exposed in uncompromising detail... This book is not about more rock star mythologizing. It's about skewering the mystery of the 27-connection, by exposing its all-too-tragic reality. Sunday Times Sounes' masterstroke is to unearth forensic levels of detail on his subjects. Jim Morrison's end in a Paris bathtub is well known, but Sounes reveals minutiae explaining the bad luck that caused this unhappy and alcoholic but probably not suicidal man to die when he did... Sounes acknowledges the danger of theorising too heavily on the 27 Club but in the main he has pulled off what could have been a tasteless project with sensitivity. And he's best of all on the subject that clearly fascinates him: the relationship between Amy Winehouse and her father. The Times A meticulously researched corrective that spares none of the often squalid truth and should, if there's any justice, put paid to decades of ill-informed mythologizing. http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/numbered+days+Winehouse+Club/8754647/story.html Montreal Gazette