ALEXANDER MASTERS; A LIFE DISCARDED
How do you write a biography of someone you’ve never met?
Condensed from a preoccupation that lasted half a decade, Alexander Masters’s latest book A Life Discarded locates fantasy in ‘a daily record of an [ordinary person’s] thoughts about their existence, written […] so to speak, from the inside’. Again, Cambridge – by now surely to be understood as the author’s topographical muse – is the tableau; the city’s seemingly uncanny ability to both produce and submerse its more ‘sensitive’ inhabitants providing reader and author — armed with paper, pen and a private investigator named Vince — a series of wildly compelling, darkly comic revelations. Read more…