A chaotic ex-rough sleeper and ex-prisoner, Stuart Shorter dismissed Masters’s first draft of his biography as ‘boring’ and urged him to 'Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards.' The resulting award-winning story, both funny and tragic, reveals a life lived among the ‘underclass’, told in reverse from his sudden death to a brawling 10-year old. Strong themes and language.