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Title details for A Life Discarded by Alexander Masters - Available

A Life Discarded

148 Diaries Found in the Trash

by Alexander Masters
Alexander Masters
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
In 2001, 148 tattered and mold-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a bin on a building site in Cambridge, England. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, mysterious diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. The anonymous author, known only as "I," reveals themselves as the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Over five years, the brilliant biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of this secret author, ending with an astounding final revelation.
A biographical detective story that unfolds with the suspense of a mystery—but has all the dazzling originality that made Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards such a beloved book—A Life Discarded is a true, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 18, 2016

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781515927969
      • File size: 150089 KB
      • Duration: 05:12:41

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 5, 2016
      With surprise, humor, and quiet insights that never seem glib, biographer Masters (Stuart: A Life Backwards) pursues an extraordinary question: what is the value of an ordinary life? With wonderful excerpts, original handwriting, photographs, sketches, and extravagant speculation, Masters brings to vivid life the 148 anonymous diaries that come into his possession, and constructs a richly compelling narrative around his experience of discovering their owner. The narrative of the diary author’s obsessions, ambitions, great loves, and disappointments is scaffolded with mysteries and discoveries that keep Masters revising his initial assumptions. He employs graphologists, private detectives, concert pianists, and judicious trespassing to understand his subject, but enjoys the anonymity, “sense of quiet universality,” and truth captured in this scrupulously documented existence. Despite some shortcomings, Masters’s subject has produced something impressive and unprecedented: “a forty-million-word description of being alive.” As much a guided tour of Masters’s own mind as that of his subject, this book is funny, original, astonishing, and poignant in its revelations that, in biography as in life, there are no tidy answers—but there is an incredible value in the ordinary, in “the resonance of tiny things” and “triumphs of a scribbled-down life.” Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge, and White (U.K.)

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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