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A Life Discarded : 148 Diaries Found in a Skip, Hardback Book

A Life Discarded : 148 Diaries Found in a Skip Hardback

Hardback

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Unique, transgressive and as funny as its subject, A Life Discarded has all the suspense of a murder mystery.

Written with his characteristic warmth, respect and humour, Masters asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heap. A Life Discarded is a biographical detective story.

In 2001, 148 tattered and mould-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a skip on a building site in Cambridge.

Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting.

They were a small part of an intimate, anonymous diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out.

Over five years, the award-winning biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of their author, with an astounding final revelation. A Life Discarded is a true, shocking, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life.

The author of the diaries, known only as `I', is the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful.

Part thrilling detective story, part love story, part social history, A Life Discarded is also an account of two writers' obsessions: of `I's need to record every second of life and of Masters' pursuit of this mysterious yet universal diarist.

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