What I was - Meg Rosoff

'I am a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore: the year I discovered love . . .'

In the early sixties on an East Anglian beach a fragile wooden hut is harried daily by the sea. It is ignored by the boys from the nearby boarding school who stumble past on their birch-enforced runs. Until the day one sixteen-year-old boy stops and comes face to face with the hut's owner: enigmatic, beguiling, beautiful Finn. The hut and the beach - but most of all Finn - provide a haven away from the petty rules and bullies. But they also hold a mysterious, fragile secret. A secret that will be tested by friendship, growing adolescent love and the terrifying fury of the sea . . .