The Perfect Stranger

The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh’s life – which took him from a Butlin’s Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java – made little sense to him, until ‘something extraordinary happened’: his meeting with Sally, ‘the perfect stranger’. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy – despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion – as it is a poet’s tribute of thanks.