Synopses & Reviews
In 1962, a 16-year-old boy is dropped off by his father at a boarding school on the windswept coast of East Anglia. It is a model of its kind-the rooms are freezing, the food is disgusting, the older boys are sadistic, and the masters are the ineffectual, damaged castoffs of a dying Empire.
But the boy is used to the drill and well practiced at detached dreaming, imagining himself someone else, somewhere else. Until one day, falling behind one of the regular runs along the coast, he meets Finn.
Finn seems like a character from a novel, or a dream. Dressed in clothes that look the way they did a century before, Finn lives alone with his cat in a tiny fisherman's hut. The two become friends, the boy risking scandalous rumour and expulsion from school.
But the idyll cannot last, disaster invades from all sides, and the boy discovers that nothing has been what he believed.
What I Was will cement Meg Rosoff's reputation as a writer of extraordinary skill and sensitivity, who recreates with uncanny exactness the passions of youth.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
Meg Rosoff, multi award winning author of How I Live Now, explores the pain of first love and coming-of-age in her compelling novel What I Was, which was once described by The Times as 'Samuel Beckett on ecstasy.'
Shall I tell you about the year I discovered love?
I'd been kicked out of two boarding schools and the last thing I wanted was to be here, on the East Anglian coast, in a third.
But without St Oswald's, I would not have discovered the fisherman's hut with its roaring fire, its striped blankets, its sea monster stew.
Without St Oswald's, I would not have met the boy with the beautiful eyes, the flickering half-smile, and no past.
Without St Oswald's I would not have met Finn.
And without Finn, there would be no story.
Shall we begin?
' . . . thrilling and sensitively told' - Observer
' . . . mordantly funny and searingly well written' - The Times
Bestselling author Meg Rosoff has received great critical acclaim since the publication of her first novel How I Live Now (winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize). Her other novels, Just in Case (winner of the 2007 Carnegie Medal) and The Bride's Farewell, are also available from Puffin. Follow Meg on Twitter @megrosoff.