In the opening years of this century, the new flagship branch of Waterstone's bookstore in London's Piccadilly, luxuriously housed in the impressive shell recently vacated by the venerable Simpsons Department Store, had the entire left wall of its ground floor running the width of the building to Jermyn Street at the rear devoted to life writing – biography, autobiography, memoir. In front of the shelves holding the massed stories of the dead and living, loaded tables promoted the best-sellers. Even fiction, which once dominated the walk-in trade, was largely relegated to the first floor, along with cookery and travel. As the genre of choice for the common reader, life writing in all its forms is having its day. So much has it encroached on fiction that it has become a commonplace to say that biography has become the new novel. If so, it is the new – superficially at least – as retro, its blockbuster proportions reminiscent of the Victorian three-decker, as are the more traditional examples of its narrative form. Biography's triumphal moment in the twenty-first century might seem, then, like the crude revenge of nineteenth-century realism on the cool ironies, unfixed identities and skewed temporalities of the postmodern.