What I Was

Author(s): Meg Rosoff

Children's Fiction

'I am a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore: the year I discovered love'. In the early sixties on an East Anglian beach, a fragile wooden hut is harried daily by the sea. It is ignored by the boys from the nearby boarding school who stumble past on their birch-enforced runs. Until the day, one sixteen-year-old boy stops and comes face to face with the hut's owner: enigmatic, beguiling, and beautiful Finn. The hut and the beach - but most of all Finn - provide a haven away from the petty rules and bullies. But they also hold a mysterious, fragile secret. A secret that will be tested by friendship, growing adolescent love and the terrifying fury of the sea.


Product Information

Runner-up for New Angle Prize for Literature 2009. Shortlisted for Carnegie Medal 2008 and Costa Children's Book Award 2007.

Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards Rosoff's most perfect novel ... it's already a classic Sunday Times Mordantly funny and searingly well written The Times An engrossing, haunting story of first love, friendship and betrayal Herald Thrilling Observer A coming-of-age novel that sucks the reader into its universe Time Out

Meg Rosoff became a publishing sensation with her first novel, How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Her second novel, Just in Case, won the Carnegie Medal in 2007. What I Was is her highly acclaimed third novel. Meg lives in London with her husband and daughter.

General Fields

  • : 9780141038315
  • : Penguin Books Ltd
  • : Penguin Books Ltd
  • : 0.146
  • : 06 August 2008
  • : 197mm X 131mm X 14mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Meg Rosoff
  • : Paperback
  • : 823.92
  • : 208