num_pages: 182
description: J.Kavanagh's early years were full of incident and the comedy, passion and the abrupt tragedy of that life are recounted in what Richard Ingrams described as 'one of the best memoirs I have read -- a brilliant self-portrait by a born writer with a humorous, poetic and genuinely religious outlook on life.' For Michael Frayn The Perfect Stranger is 'a fine memorial to youth and love -- perhaps to the youth and love of all our generation'. From a Butlin holiday camp to Switzerland and then Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java, his life made little sense to him until 'something extraordinary happened': he met 'the perfect stranger' of the title, with its oblique tribute to Louis MacNeice. This tender, funny and unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love, with its shocking conclusion, is a poet's tribute of thanks.
language: English
title: The Perfect Stranger
titlecomplete: The Perfect Stranger
genres: Autobiography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography
ratings_count: 105
publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.