NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • Bono—artist activist and the lead singer of Irish rock band
U2—has written a memoir: honest and irreverent intimate and profound Surrender is the story
of the remarkable life he’s lived the challenges he’s faced and the friends and family who
have shaped and sustained him. • A VOGUE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A brilliant very funny
very revealing autobiography-through-music. Maybe the best book ever written about being a
rockstar.” — Caitlin Moran award-winning journalist “When I started to write this book I
was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs. The people places
and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in
Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking) it was not a natural concept. A
word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this
most humbling of commands. In the band in my marriage in my faith in my life as an activist.
Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress ... With a fair amount of fun along
the way.” —Bono As one of the music world’s most iconic artists and the cofounder of the
organizations ONE and (RED) Bono’s career has been written about extensively. But in Surrender
it’s Bono who picks up the pen writing for the first time about his remarkable life and those
he has shared it with. In his unique voice Bono takes us from his early days growing up in
Dublin including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen to U2’s unlikely journey
to become one of the world’s most influential rock bands to his more than twenty years of
activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. Writing with candor
self-reflection and humor Bono opens the aperture on his life—and the family friends and
faith that have sustained challenged and shaped him. Surrender ’s subtitle 40 Songs One
Story is a nod to the book’s forty chapters which are each named after a U2 song. Bono has
also created forty original drawings for Surrender which appear throughout the book.
