The Perfect Stranger

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

P. J. Kavanagh (1931-2015) was a poet, writer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. The Perfect Stranger, awarded the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize in 1966, describes his early life. Poetry was his major occupation. His New Selected Poems came out in 2014, and earlier collections include Presences (1987), An Enchantment (1991) and Something About (2004). His Collected Poems was given the Cholmondeley Award in 1992. 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). His novel A Song and Dance won the 1968 Guardian Fiction Prize, and he wrote five more. A travel-autobiography Finding Connections traces his Irish forebears in New Zealand. 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.