The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh’s life – which took him from a Butlin’s Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java – made little sense to him, until ‘something extraordinary happened’: his meeting with Sally, ‘the perfect stranger’.

This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy – despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion – as it is a poet’s tribute of thanks.

Review

'The writing remains vivid and detailed, full of concise pen portraits ... it's hard to think of a memoir by a male author that describes the experience [of love] with as much honesty, passion and precision.' --David Nicholls

'A fine memorial to love and youth.' --Michael Frayn

'One of the best memoirs I have read ... humorous and poetic.' --Richard Ingrams

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

'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.' --The 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' --The Independent

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

'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

'Patrick Kavanagh's memoir is a small masterpiece of its kind, reflecting all the wit, unabashed frankness and literary elegance of its author.' --Max Hastings

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