Strange how you come across some books. About a year ago, on the way home from the funeral of one of my closest friends, we stopped off at the family home of the girl who was giving me a lift. Her Mum was reading this book, and somehow I knew I also wanted to read it. It wasn’t until I picked it up last week that I realised it was a biography of a homeless man from Cambridge. Stuart Shorter is a ‘chaotic’, oddly lucid yet constantly unpredictable, and the book is as much about how the author eeks out Stuart’s life story as it is about the events of Stuart’s life. It’s compelling, desperately sad but never slushy. One of the most affecting parts, in fact, is the letter written to the author by one of Stuart’s former teachers which is printed in the epilogue. It captures the tragedy of how some children slip through the cracks, are failed by the adults around them, and end up flailing around on the fringes of society. This is an important book because it brings these issues up so close that it shocks you.