This was certainly an unusual biography in that author did not know who the subject was when he wrote it - not even if male or female, living or dead. It all started when his friends Richard and Dido (both Cambridge academics) found and recovered 148 tatty books from a skip which were the very wordy diaries of someone written over several decades going back to the 1960s.

Alexander Masters uses the diaries to write about the unknown author of them, even at one point consulting a graphologist to try and paint a picture of the sort of person the author was.

I was at times a little confused in the telling as Alexander didn't write about the diaries chronologically, as indeed he didn't even read them chronologically which would have been the first thing I would have done if I'd found such a collection. He also spent a fair bit of time researching into the author from the facts he uncovered but didn’t actually want to know his/her name. The latter being the main thing I wanted to know when reading ‘A Life Discarded’!

I did enjoy the book but found the end a little unsatisfying as there are so many more questions I wanted answered. I was also slightly disconcerted to find that the name given as the author of the diaries isn't the correct one. But I did enjoy doing a bit of online research and found the correct author's name from all the clues in the book! I won't say more as I don't want to give away Alexander's story but would encourage you to read it yourself.

I really enjoyed this book, as much a biography of the mysterious diarist as an autobiography of Masters and his friends during the five years he worked on the diaries and writing this book. I sped through it in a matter of hours, the writing kept me transfixed.