Whilst living in a subterranean multi-storey car park, he was rescued by two outreach workers, and was found a flat to live in. In 1998, following a five-year jail sentence for armed robbery, Stuart’s life reached its lowest ebb. With the book, I managed to build up a completely different image of Stuart in my head than the one I’d witnessed on screen: Stuart of the book was a lot more angst-ridden and it was easier to build up an idea of his general demeanor from Alexander’s written opinions and observations, rather than having to view Stuart (the character) from somebody else’s perceptions of the text. The book, naturally, is vastly different in places and in information to the film which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Alexander Masters and Tom Hardy as Stuart.

Despite spending the majority of his life in and out of prisons and homeless hostels, he fathered a son and worked alongside Alexander Masters to free two wrongly-jailed Charity Workers… As a child, he was sexually abused by his older brother and was later put into a children’s home where he was abused again. Written from Masters’ viewpoint, the story is told backwards, trying to find out where it all went wrong for Stuart Clive Shorter, a Cambridge man born doomed…and with muscular dystrophy. So knowing from the film what the outline for the book would be, I knew that ‘Stuart A Life Backwards’ would be right up my alley – and so it was… I like books, rather morbidly, about ‘inspirational’ stories, books like ‘The Kid’, ‘A Child Called It’ and ‘Scarred’. I’d seen the film adaptation for this book a few years ago, sitting back and enjoying it as a Benedict Cumberbatch fan but also as a person infinitely interested in the human condition.

Alexander masters benedict cumberbatch