The Perfect Stranger

PJ Kavanagh

ISBN 10: 1910463299 / ISBN 13: 9781910463291

Published by September, 2016

About this Item

First published in 1966 this classic memoir by the poet, actor and broadcaster PJ Kavanagh looks back on his schooldays, followed by jobs as a barman and Butlin?s Redcoat, a bohemian spell in Paris, and National Service in Korea, where he was shot. Moving and funny, it tells how his love for his first wife, Sally Lehmann, who died from polio, cured him of his youthful cynicism and disaffection.

Seller Inventory # 536673

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Perfect Stranger
• Publisher: September
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1910463299
• ISBN 13: 9781910463291
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

P. J. Kavanagh was a poet, writer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. Born in 1931, son of the radio comedy writer Ted Kavanagh, he went to a Benedictine school, served in the Korean war during national service, and worked for the British Council in Barcelona and Indonesia. He acted on stage and TV - his last appearance in an episode of Father Ted. The Perfect Stranger, awarded the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize in 1966, describes his early life. 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). Poetry remained his major occupation. His New Selected Poems came out in 2014. Earlier collections include Presences (1987), An Enchantment (1991) and Something About (2004). His Collected Poems was given the Cholmondeley Award in 1992. His novel A Song and Dance won the 1968 Guardian Fiction Prize. His other novels are A Happy Man, People and Weather and Only by Mistake, and for younger readers Scarf Jack and Rebel for Good. A travel-autobiography Finding Connections traces his Irish forebears in New Zealand. He edited G. K. Chesterton and Ivor Gurney, and the anthologies Voices in Ireland, The Oxford Book of Short Poems (with James Michie) and A Book of Consolations. 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.