Presented by Penguin.

THE #1 NY TIMES BESTSELLER

A Times, Sunday Instances and Telegraph Publication of the Year

‘A triumph … a masterclass in the bottling of its subject’s seductive essence. His presence with this book is indeed strong that it is hard to trust he has actually remaining the building’

MOJO

‘Handsomely presented, aesthetically sumptuous’

THE TIMES

From Prince himself comes the brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom tale of one of the greatest artists of most time-featuring never-before- about THE STUNNING Ones seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death.

Prince was a music genius, perhaps one of the most talented, beloved, accomplished, popular, and acclaimed musicians in pop background. But he wasn’t only a musician-he was also a startlingly primary visionary with an creativity deep more than enough to whip up whole worlds, from your sexy, gritty funk heaven of his early information to the mythical landscaping of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of Paisley Park. But his biggest creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, delivered in Minnesota, into Prince, the greatest pop celebrity of his era.

THE STUNNING Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince-a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then making a persona, an artistic vision, and a lifestyle, before the hits and fame that could come to define him. The reserve is informed in four parts. The foremost is composed of the memoir he was writing before his tragic loss of life, pages that brings us into Prince’s childhood globe through his very own lyrical prose. The next part will take us into Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first record released, through a scrapbook of Prince’s composing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid pictures that take us up to the cusp of his best achievement, which we observe in the book’s fourth section: his initial handwritten treatment for Purple Rain-the last stage in Prince’s self-creation, as he retells the autobiography we’ve seen in the first three parts as a heroic journey.

The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his final days-a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated-and annotations offering context to each one of the book’s images.

This work is not just a tribute to Prince, but an original and energizing literary work, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image, his undying gift to the world.

‘Prince’s voice comes through loud and obvious; his character, joie de vivre and single-mindedness jumping from the web page throughout.’

CLASSIC POP Newspaper

‘The Beautiful Ones is for everyone. It’s not a go through, but an event, an immersion in the mind of a musical genius. You are steeped in Prince’s images, his terms, his fact… The book could be a starting point for a Prince fascination, or a continuation of long-standing admiration. Either way, it will deepen the bond of any reader with the musical icon.”

USA TODAY

‘The Beautiful Ones remains a jewel-like fragment, Piepenbring’s delicate introduction providing a snapshot from the Purple One’s last months at Paisley Recreation area and through the Piano and Microphone tour’ Q MAGAZINE

‘An affirmation of Prince’s Blackness and mankind… Prince writes about his youth with clarity and poetic flair, very easily combining funny anecdotes with deep self-reflection and musical analysis… Prince is one of us – he simply worked to manifest dreams that had taken him from your North Side of Minneapolis towards the Super Bowl.’

HUFFPOST

‘A compelling attention that discovers its writer orbiting around a few touchingly personal encounters with his sphinx-like subject … with passages, lyric bedding and photographs through the Purple One himself’

TELEGRAPH, Books of the Year

‘A memoir that is compiled by Prince, actually. Handwritten pages he had shared with Piepenbring constitute Part 1, taking us from his first memory space – his mother’s eyes – through the early days of his career… The Beautiful Types doesn’t paint an ideal picture. It’s not definitive. It can’t be, it must not be and, thankfully, it doesn’t try to become. We’ll never know very well what it might have already been if Prince got lived. But it’s an excellent start. Today, it’s up to us to consider what’s there and make something from it for ourselves, creating, just like Prince needed.’

NPR

‘Both a pleasure and a surprise … Prince required the project extremely seriously, and it displays in the task he delivered.. It shines a romantic and uncovering light in the least-known period of his life’

VARIETY

‘The Beautiful Ones is a book in pieces, fragments of the ground-breaking autobiography Prince had planned. Pieced collectively after his death in 2016, it collects his handwritten childhood memoires, superb personal photographs and his chosen co-writer Dan Piepenbring’s brilliant account of their short collaboration. Yet incredibly regardless of the central absence, it still catches something of Prince between your spaces – a trace of perfume, a look to camera, a first kiss’ SUNDAY TIMES, Book of the Year

‘This is a beautiful book and a must-have for Prince completists’

DAILY EXPRESS

‘A ghostly memoir of a pop story’

THE i