The Perfect Stranger: A Memoir of Love and Survival - Softcover

PJ Kavanagh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910463299 ISBN 13: 9781910463291

Publisher: September, 2016

Synopsis

Written with a poet's precision, The Perfect Stranger is a funny, absorbing and brilliantly portrayed rite of passage

First published in 1966, this extraordinary memoir has collected a passionate band of devotees. Written with a poet's precision, it is a funny, absorbing and brilliantly portrayed rite of passage - from school playing fields to war's battlefields, holiday camps to writers' hang-outs, Brighton to Paris, Korea to Oxford, Barcelona to Jakarta...

Driving the narrator is a desire to recount the effect of a singular young woman; the love of her and the loss of her. A joyous and movingly wise evocation of youth, travel and love; those moments of maximum brilliance, at the edge of possibility.

PRAISE FOR THE PERFECT STRANGER

'Hard to think of a memoir that describes the experience [of love] with as much honesty, passion and precision' David Nicholls

'A small masterpiece of its kind, reflecting all the wit, unabashed frankness and literary elegance of its author' Max Hastings

'A joyous yet unsentimental account of Kavanagh's early life and his few years with Sally. A story of love and tragic loss' Guardian

'Not sentimental nor self-pitying but vivid, humorous and bent upon describing a world in which the one person who had seemed to make sense of it had been lost' Telegraph

'A fine memorial to love and youth' Michael Frayn, author of Headlong and Spies

'To hear the truth so devastatingly and yet so joyfully encountered is rare in an age where autobiography has been flattened by the massed weight of political and public reminiscence. This autobiography, from its beginning to its bitter end, is a celebration of joy: joy in youth, in woman, in male camaraderie, in the struggle of art, in married love' Times Literary Supplement

'[A] remarkable work of prose... It won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize, for in reality it was a testimony to the absence of the one person who could help him work out the puzzle of life, his wife, Sally' Independent

'I've re-read The Perfect Stranger many times and still think it, though unique, a model "of its kind" ' Derek Mahon

'A terrific book, vivid, funny and moving... The account of his narrow escape from the great battle in Korea is brilliant, as is in a quite different way the elegiac conclusion to the book' David Lodge

About this title

About the Author

P. J. Kavanagh was a poet, writer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. Born in 1931, son of the radio comedy writer Ted Kavanagh, he went to a Benedictine school, served in the Korean war during national service, and worked for the British Council in Barcelona and Indonesia. He acted on stage and TV - his last appearance in an episode of Father Ted. The Perfect Stranger, awarded the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize in 1966, describes his early life. His columns for The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement (he called them substitute poems) are collected in People and Places (1988) and A Kind of Journal (2003).

Poetry remained his major occupation. His New Selected Poems came out in 2014. Earlier collections include Presences (1987), An Enchantment (1991) and Something About (2004). His Collected Poems was given the Cholmondeley Award in 1992.

His novel A Song and Dance won the 1968 Guardian Fiction Prize. His other novels are A Happy Man, People and Weather and Only by Mistake, and for younger readers Scarf Jack and Rebel for Good. A travel-autobiography Finding Connections traces his Irish forebears in New Zealand. He edited G. K. Chesterton and Ivor Gurney, and the anthologies Voices in Ireland, The Oxford Book of Short Poems (with James Michie) and A Book of Consolations.

P. J. died in August 2015 in the Cotswold hills, where he had come to live with his wife and two sons over forty years before.

Edition details

• Publisher: September
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1910463299
• ISBN 13: 9781910463291
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224