Soho Press

Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar, and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, Stephen, gay and precocious, endures misery, love affairs, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment, to emerge, at the age of eighteen, ready to start over in a world in which he had always felt a stranger. One of very few Cambridge University graduates to have been imprisoned prior to his freshman year, Fry is a brilliantly idiosyncratic character who continues to attract controversy, empathy and real devotion. A classic coming-of-age memoir, by turns deeply moving and laugh-out-loud funny.