This Boy's Life is Tobias Wolff's captivating re-creation of his youth, so true in its every particular that, whatever our own experience, we cannot help but recognize ourselves in him. In 1955 he and his mother drive from Florida to Utah in the hope of getting rich on uranium. When this doesn't happen they drift on, finally settling down in a village in the Cascade mountains of Washington State, where his mother's remarriage brings the sequence of new jobs and suitors to an end. Here, where the fresh start becomes a fight for his identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of his Dickensian stepfather, the boy begins the strange process of growing up.

Wolff brings to life the stuff of boyhood, and the violence and wild optimism of America at that time. But his main achievement is the portrayal of the boy he was; by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, seeing no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. His various schemes - running away to Alaska, forging cheques and stealing cars - lead, eventually, to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility. With humour, force and feeling, Tobias Wo9lff gives us an indelible picture of childhood, a memoir that is sure to be a classic.