Stuart: A Life Backwards

In this extraordinary book, Alexander Masters has created a moving portrait of a troubled man, an unlikely friendship, and a desperate world few ever see. A gripping who-done-it journey back in time, it begins with Masters meeting a drunken Stuart lying on a sidewalk in Cambridge, England, and leads through layers of hell...back through crimes and misdemeanors, prison and homelessness, suicide attempts, violence, drugs, juvenile halls and special schools-to expose the smiling, gregarious thirteen-year-old boy who was Stuart before his long, sprawling, dangerous fall.

Shocking, inspiring, and hilarious by turns, Stuart: A Life Backwards is a writer's quest to give voice to a man who, beneath his forbidding exterior, has a message for us all: that every life-even the most chaotic and disreputable-is a story worthy of being told.

Author: Alexander Masters
Publisher: Delta
Published: 05/29/2007
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.21h x 5.54w x 0.84d
ISBN: 9780385340885

Review Citation(s):
Entertainment Weekly 06/29/2007 pg. 141
New York Times 08/05/2007 pg. 20

About the Author
Alexander Masters was born in New York in 1965 and studied physics and mathematics in London and Cambridge. For the last five years he has worked in hostels for the homeless and run a street newspaper. He has also been an agony aunt, a travel writer, an illustrator, and a bedspread salesman.