The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

‘Restoration Heart’ is a biography of the heart about an English writer and publisher who suffers a post-divorce, mid-life breakdown and is restored by architecture, love and beauty. It’s a story of love, divorce and redemption with an Elizabethan house at its heart: at the start of the memoir his old family house, Upton Cressett, is as much in need of being rescued and ‘fixed up’ as is its owner. The memoir also holds up a dark lens to the Bonfire of the Vanities generation that Cash was a paid-up member of after leaving Cambridge. It is book-ended with a preface and epilogue set at his 50th birthday weekend party when he reflects back on the life scorecard of his greed-is-good Moneyman generation of the 1980s who used Wall Street and Liar’s Poker as their graduate career and even ‘life’ manuals (a theme Cash wrote about in a Sunday Times Magazine article on the 30th anniversary of Bonfire).