Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie

by Alexander Larman

A major new biography of David Bowie on the 10th anniversary of his death, exploring the second half of his career from commerical failures to critical rebirth in the 21st century.

When David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, aged 69, his death was greeted with the greatest display of public mourning since Princess Diana three decades before.

Twenty-five years before, Bowie appeared to be washed up. His Eighties career had been a slow descent into self-parody, his attempts to diversify into hard rock with the had been disastrous, and the art-rock music with which he had made his name was badly out of fashion. The Thin White Duke needed a miracle if he was not only going to be able to assume his rightful place at the top of the rock music firmament, but even to continue his career. And a miracle – a resurrection from the dead – is precisely what happened.

The Second Coming of David Bowie is the first biography of Bowie that tells the full and candid story of what happened in between those two apparently unbridgeable points. With new and exclusive interviews with the musicians, filmmakers and cultural figures who worked with and befriended Bowie throughout this period, Lazarus is the definitive account of the previously overlooked and fascinating latter half of a great and distinguished career. A career that climaxed with his final masterpiece, Blackstar, and the unprecedented theatrical flourish of his departure from the stage as he passed into legend.

Audible Audio

Expected publication January 1, 2026

About the author

Alexander Larman is an author, historian and journalist. After reading English at Oxford, from where he graduated with a First, he ghost-wrote and edited various memoirs and biographies, including the late artist and flâneur Sebastian Horsley’s Dandy In The Underworld. His involvement with the book led Horsley to say ‘there is no man in London more capable of genius – or a flop – than Alexander Larman’.

He began his own writing career with Blazing Star (Head of Zeus, 2014), a biography of the 17th century poet and libertine Lord Rochester, and followed this with Restoration (Head of Zeus, 2016) a social history of the year 1666, and Byron’s Women (Head of Zeus, 2016), an ‘anti-biography’ of the poet Lord Byron and the significant women in his life. His next book, The Crown in Crisis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) was a revisionist history of the abdication saga. It was selected by the Times, Daily Mail and Daily Express as one of their best books of the year and led to significant international media coverage of the new revelations about the event.

As a journalist, Larman regularly contributes to titles including The Observer, The Critic, the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and The Chap, for which he serves as literary editor. He lives in Oxford with his wife and daughter.