Dear Reader

Welcome to BookCrossing and thanks for being a part of World Book Night 2011, the largest book giveaway in history. 1,000,000 specially printed copies of 25 different books changed hands on March 5th 2011 and began their journey from reader to reader. This book is one of them. World Book Night has joined with BookCrossing to help track these books as they travel. You can be a part of that journey by making a comment in the book's journal here on BookCrossing. Your journal entry can say how you got the book, what you thought of it, your plans for it or whatever else you might like to add.

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Thanks in advance for being part of World Book Night and BookCrossing. And happy reading and sharing.

This book is being released via BookCrossing on 5 March 2011 as part of the inaugural World Book Night. With the full support of the Publishers Association, the Booksellers Association, the Independent Publishers Guild, the Reading Agency with libraries, World Book Day and the BBC, one million books will be given away by an army of passionate readers to members of the public across the UK and Ireland.

Read and release!

Released at Ipswich monthly meetup.

Picked up at the Ipswich meet to be relocated to Eastbridge.

On the bookshelf in the upper room near the piano.

I knew nothing at all about this book or it's author so I cam to it without any preconceptions. I have to say that it doesn't offer a promising start with Stuart, the subject of the book, proclaiming that it is 'bollocks boring'. To be fair he is referring to a draft and not the finished article. Even so it must be a confident author who opens his book with such a negative critique.

At this stage Stuart suggests to Masters that he writes his lifestory 'backwards' and from there the book unfolds. Each section takes us back to an earlier period of Stuart's life as Masters attempts to uncover how he became the social misfit that Masters met as part of the campaign to free the 'Cambridge Two'. (Two leading charity workers in a homeless people's hostel who had 'allowed' drugs to be sold on their premises.)

Ultimately the reason isn't found. Certainly there are plenty of probable causes but, as Stuart points out himself, not everybody who had a life such as his committed the same crimes that he did. Where Masters undoubtedly succeeds though is in painting a picture of a fascinating character.

This has been left in a school staffroom so it is not accessible to the general public. In fact it was released there some time ago and has since been away, come back and moved on again.