Bread of Angels
from the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids
Published on 4. November 2025
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-1-4088-6772-3 (ISBN)
Description
'Smith's eye for life's everyday transcendence rarely fails her' Sunday Times, 'Books of the Year'
'A triumph' Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times, 'Books of the Year'
'Quietly sacred, utterly beautiful' Service95
A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award Winner Just Kids.
God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child's world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies.
The most intimate of Smith's memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, 'Dancing Barefoot' and 'Because the Night'.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.
As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again - the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.
'A triumph' Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times, 'Books of the Year'
'Quietly sacred, utterly beautiful' Service95
A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award Winner Just Kids.
God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child's world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies.
The most intimate of Smith's memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, 'Dancing Barefoot' and 'Because the Night'.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.
As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again - the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.
Reviews / Votes
Patti Smith's Bread of Angels is a triumph -- Joseph O'Connor * Irish Times, Books of the Year * Smith's eye for life's everyday transcendence rarely fails her * Sunday Times, Books of the Year * Quietly sacred, utterly beautiful * Service 95 * Reads more like a gospel or a beat prose-poem than a conventional autobiography ... Smith is acutely aware of being part of a dying breed, those who grew up outdoors, devoured books - and fell in love. At a time when love has never been so undervalued, when "boyfriends are embarrassing", according to Vogue, when the union of two humans is mere content, it is lovely to read about love as sacred. Smith, once again, shows us a better way to be ourselves * Evening Standard * The post-pandemic flood of artist memoirs continues, but Patti Smith stands apart... you see the rebel artist being born in stop-motion...The narrative is radiant and intimate... A transcendent sequence that follows - like those moments in her songs when poetic incantation takes flight - displays her eccentric writing style not as a tic but a superpower... She sang herself into being. She's written - is still writing - her own story * Guardian * Just Kids is the memoir we've name-checked as a favourite read for the last 15 years, but just wait until you've sunk your teeth into Patti Smith's latest Bread of Angels. From her postwar childhood to becoming a rock icon and poet, she reflects on art, love and resilience in her most intimate memoir to date * Elle * Her greatest creation - the idea of what an artist should be - will live on for decades yet * The Times * In her lyrical, moving memoir Bread of Angels rock goddess Patti Smith tells the story of how she 'found her voice' - both the singing and writing kind * Independent * A fantastic read - a portrait of an artist who was at the heart of New York's counter-cultural scene in the 1970s... a warm and thoughtful person, with an intense aesthetic sensibility and a - just as intense - love of family. Her losses have shaped her. Her poetic artistry has shaped us all * BBC * Poetic and immersive [...] Bread of Angels is both a prequel and a sequel to the bestselling Just Kids [...] from 'rock's renaissance woman' * i Paper * Smith's evocative memoir of life at the forefront of the bohemian music scene is imbued with her customary lyricism and unwavering cool * Waterstones * Essential reading ... Bread of Angels is the latest in Patti Smith's series of memoirs. This one focuses on her teenage years, where the beginnings of her creativity emerged in the poetry and lyrics that went on to form her unique style * The Gloss * Smith's life has a feeling of something from a lost world ... In these pages, "the hourglass overturns. Each grain a word that erupts into a thousand more". It is a deep pleasure to spend time lost in this world of memories, ideas and poetry * Spectator * Like Burke, the musician and poet Patti Smith had a tough start in life, living in poverty and frequently confined to her bed from illnesses including tuberculosis, scarlet fever and pneumonia. Soulful and intimate, Bread of Angels is Smith's fourth volume of autobiography, and details her childhood, her decade away from music raising a family and her return to work following a series of devastating personal losses * Guardian, Books of the Year * Bread of Angels is not [Patti's] first memoir... but it is a full-on autobiography, and the only one I know written by a rock star that recounts a three dimensional artist's journey. This is the autobiography of a sensibility as well as an individual, its nearest equivalent being Dylan's illuminating, episodic and charmingly unreliable Chronicles, Volume 1 ... There is no one like her, though many have tried to emulate her. Swimming ecstatically in the 'sea of possibilities', she created entirely new vistas of what women could do in rock and she unveils in Bread of Angels a literary voice as unique and mesmeric as the voice we heard on that first album * Literary Review * Fans will devour it * Grazia * An expansive cradle-to-late-life account of Smith's experiences over eight decades. One of the marvels of Bread of Angels is that... it is remarkably fresh, with long sections on subjects about which Smith has rarely written or even said much publicly ... Enlightening * New York Times Book Review * Bread of Angels is Smith's most straightforwardly autobiographical book to date ... Her focus this time is her trajectory from a working-class childhood in Pennsylvania and south Jersey into her stage and recording career - which she put on hiatus during her marriage and reignited during her widowhood... Veers between elegy and engagement * NPR * Some of the National Book Award winner's most intimate recollections to date - as sweeping in scope as they are pivotal to understanding the woman behind the accolades * Hollywood Reporter * Bread of Angels augments the list of romantically crumbling places that Smith treasures. Riveting ... We love her because of her aura of rough authenticity, her earnestness, her seer's way with words and her occasional snarl * Washington Post * Mesmerizing. Transcendent. Like Jeanette Walls' classic, The Glass Castle, Smith's saga begins with a hardscrabble childhood... and unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale ... I wish I could simply reprint those pages here - they moved me deeply * Los Angeles Times * If Just Kids is about innocence and ambition, Bread of Angels - a sister to that book... deals with the more painful realities of experience. She fills in what the earlier memoir leaves in the background: her childhood, her marriage, her fame ... Near the end of our conversation, Smith brought up her desire, invoked early in her memoir, to write something in which everyone would find a piece of themselves * The Atlantic * An intimate journey through Smith's life * People *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Edition type
International edition
Illustrations
17 BLACK-&-WHITE PHOTOS
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 31 mm
Weight
484 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4088-6772-3 (9781408867723)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/2025
Random House Large Print
€30.50
Shipment within 10-20 days
Person
Patti Smith is a writer, performer and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time by Rolling Stone. Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, Auguries of Innocence, M Train and Year of the Monkey. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honour given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Smith resides in New York City.