The perfect stranger - P. J. Kavanagh

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