Mr Wilder & Me

It is a historical novel set in the late 1970s, and tells the story of Hollywood director Billy Wilder's struggles to write, finance and shoot his penultimate film Fedora, as observed through the eyes of a young Greek interpreter.

Calista Frangopoulou, a 57-year-old, London-based film composer, is facing a crisis in her life, as her offers of work dry up and her daughter Fran struggles with an unwanted pregnancy.

In Munich, at a dinner in honour of the film's composer Miklós Rózsa, Calista listens as Wilder confronts a young German diner who is a proponent of holocaust denial.

The production of Fedora moves to Paris, where Calista has long conversations with Wilder's and Diamond's wives, and sleeps with Matthew, a young man whose mother is working on the film.

[1] Writing for The Scotsman, Allan Massie described it as "a bittersweet delight with a dark and horrible background",[2] while Mark Lawson in The Guardian wrote that 'Wilder, charismatically wise-cracking but haunted by history, and Diamond, agonised by the lengthy complexity of turning words into pictures, give the book the feel of a real movie memoir.