For more than a one fourth century, biographer Philip Norman’s internationally bestselling Shout! continues to be unchallenged as the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, at last, Norman turns his formidable skill towards the Beatle for whom being truly a Beatle was hardly ever enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all of the main characters, Norman presents the comprehensive and most uncovering family portrait of John Lennon ever published.

This masterly biography takes a fresh and about John Lennon: THE LIFE SPAN penetrating look at every part of Lennon’s much-chronicled life, like the songs that have turned him, posthumously, right into a near-secular saint. In three years of study, Norman has turned up an extraordinary amount of new information regarding actually the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore-his upbringing by his rigid Aunt Mimi; his allegedly wasted school and college student days; the evolution of his peerless innovative collaboration with Paul McCartney; his Beatle-busting romance with a Japanese performance musician; his forays into painting and books; his experiments with Transcendental Meditation, primal scream therapy, and medications. The book’s several crucial informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, Sean Lennon-whose moving reminiscence discloses his father as by no means seen before-and Yoko Ono, who talks with sometimes surprising candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John.

“[A] haunting, mammoth, wonderful piece of work.” -New York Situations

Honest and unflinching, as John himself would desire, Norman gives all of us the whole man in every his unlimited contradictions-tough and cynical, hilariously funny but also naive, vulnerable and insecure-and reveals the way the mom who gave him aside as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the others of his days.