Kirjahaku

â??Stuart does not like the manuscript. Heâ??s after a bestseller, â??like what Tom Clancy writesâ?. â??But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs,â? I point out. You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add.â??

From the author of â??Stuart: A Life Backwardsâ??; a warm and witty portrait of a harmless, eccentric, bona fide genius.

Unique, transgressive and as funny as its subject, A Life Discarded has all the suspense of a murder mystery. Written with his characteristic warmth, respect and humour, Masters asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heap.

The winner of the Guardian First Book Award that reinvented the biographic form. One of the ten books – novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography – that make up our Matchbook Classics’ series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist. Stuart: A Life Backwards expanded the possibilities of what a biography could be: the stories it could tell, and how it could tell them. It is about a remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer (‘a middle-class scum ponce, if you want to be honest about it, Alexander’), and Stuart Shorter, a thief, hostage-taker, psycho and street raconteur. Told backwards – Stuart’s idea – it starts with a deeply troubled thirty-two-year-old stepping out in front of the 11.15 train from London to King’s Lynn, and ends with a ‘happy-go-lucky little boy’ of twelve. Compelling, humane and funny, it is as extraordinary and unexpected as the life it describes.

Alexander Masters, the bestselling author of Stuart: A Life Backwards, asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heapIn 2001, 148 tattered and mold-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a bin on a building site in Cambridge, England. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, mysterious diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. The anonymous author, known only as "I," is revealed as the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Over five years, the brilliant biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of this secret author, ending with an astounding final revelation. A biographical detective story that unfolds with the suspense of a mystery--but has all the dazzling originality that made Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards such a beloved book--A Life Discarded is a true, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life.

In this extraordinary book, Alexander Masters has created a moving portrait of a troubled man, an unlikely friendship, and a desperate world few ever see. A gripping who-done-it journey back in time, it begins with Masters meeting a drunken Stuart lying on a sidewalk in Cambridge, England, and leads through layers of hell...back through crimes and misdemeanors, prison and homelessness, suicide attempts, violence, drugs, juvenile halls and special schools-to expose the smiling, gregarious thirteen-year-old boy who was Stuart before his long, sprawling, dangerous fall. Shocking, inspiring, and hilarious by turns, Stuart: A Life Backwards is a writer's quest to give voice to a man who, beneath his forbidding exterior, has a message for us all: that every life-even the most chaotic and disreputable-is a story worthy of being told.