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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>Diana Athill's fascinating analysis of her relationshup with Black Power activist Hakim Jamal whose book, From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me, she edited in the 1960s. Against all odds, they became friends, sometimes lovers.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>In Make Believe, Diana Athill, acclaimed author of Instead of a Letter and Stet, remembers her turbulent friendship with Hakim Jamal, a young black convert to the teachings of Malcolm X, whom she met in London in the late 1960s. Despite a desperately troubled youth, he became an eloquent spokesman for the black underclass, was Jean Seberg's lover and published a book about Malcolm X, before descending into a mania that had him believing he was God. A witness to his struggles, Diana Athill writes with her characteristic honesty about her entanglement with Jamal, Jamal's relationship with the daughter of a British MP, Gail Benson, and Jamal's, and separately Gail's, eventual murders.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><P>Unnervingly candid, cooly harrowing, redolent of the hectic late Sixties and early Seventies but oddly suggestive of the tortuous depths that all relationships hold <BR> A memoir with the immediacy and grip of a good novel<BR><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><P>DIANA ATHILL was born in 1917. She helped Andre Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Athill's distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her acclaimed memoir "Stet," which is also published by Granta Books, as are five volumes of memoirs, "Instead" "of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End" and a novel, "Don't Look at Me Like That." In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for "Somewhere Towards the End," and was presented with an OBE. She lives in London."

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