# Berlin *David Bowie, the Berlin Trilogy, and the Long Road to Blackstar* — Legendary Biographies No. 190 - **Subject:** David Robert Jones (David Bowie) - **Written by:** Edmund Halloran - **Shelf:** Music / Rock - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 221 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 221 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 221 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-022-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale (ISBN 979-8-90623-035-5) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/190-berlin.html ## About this book Berlin, 1976. A thirty-year-old man rents a studio apartment over a Turkish cafe in Schöneberg, off the books, with cash. He is by some distance the most famous singer in Britain. He is also functionally bankrupt, hospitalised twice that year for cardiac arrhythmia, and convinced — for stretches he later admitted — that the records he is making in West Berlin will be the last ones anyone listens to. Edmund Halloran writes the David Bowie biography that takes the middle, not the ascent. Hansa Studio One. Tony Visconti at the desk, Brian Eno at the EMS Synthi, Iggy Pop in the spare room. Low. Heroes. Lodger. The trilogy that the press resented and the next decade absorbed wholesale. Halloran's argument, against every previous biography, is that the Berlin records are the actual centre of the Bowie discography — not Ziggy Stardust, not the Aladdin Sane press cycle, not even the Lazarus death-album. Drawing on Visconti's session notes, the Hansa archive, Iggy's tour diaries, decades of Bowie's own contradictory testimony, and his own thirty years writing the British rock magazines that no longer exist, Halloran assembles a portrait of an artist in retreat — and of the West Berlin that gave him the room to make the music that defines the second half of his life. ## Contents 1. Brixton Boy 2. Terry 3. The Wrong Eye 4. A Lad Insane 5. Space Oddity 6. Ziggy Stardust 7. Diamond Dogs 8. Station to Station 9. Heroes 10. Let's Dance 11. Glass Spider 12. Jump They Say 13. Outside / Earthling 14. Reality 15. The Ghost 16. The Next Day 17. Lazarus 18. Blackstar 19. Moonage Daydream ## Questions **Who is Berlin about?** David Robert Jones (David Bowie). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Berlin — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,744 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 221 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Edmund Halloran is a Dublin-born investigative journalist who reported on the Troubles for the Irish Times before turning to book-length biography of public figures whose lives intersected with state violence. His long-form research focuses on archival investigation and oral histories, seeking to reconstruct the lived realities of individuals during periods of intense geopolitical upheaval. He lives in Belfast, where he is currently researching his next historical project and volunteering at a local community archive.