''What I Was'' is

Meg Rosoff Meg Rosoff (born 16 October 1956) is an American writer based in London, United Kingdom. She is best known for the novel ''How I Live Now'' (Puffin, 2004), which won the Guardian Prize, Printz Award, and Branford Boase Award and made the Whit ...

's third novel for

young adults A young adult is generally a person in the years following adolescence. Definitions and opinions on what qualifies as a young adult vary, with works such as Erik Erikson's stages of human development significantly influencing the definition of ...

. The book was published in 2007, and was shortlisted for both the Costa Children's Book Award and the Carnegie Medal.The CILIP Carnegie Medal & Kate Greenaway Children's Book Awards
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Plot introduction

''What I Was'' tells the story of a secret friendship between two teenagers, one an unhappy

public school Public school may refer to: * State school (known as a public school in many countries), a no-fee school, publicly funded and operated by the government *Public school (United Kingdom), certain elite fee-charging independent schools in England and ...

boy and the other living an independent and isolated life on the beach near the school. It is set on the

East Anglia East Anglia is an area in the East of England, often defined as including the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles, a people whose name originated in Anglia, in ...

n coast in 1962.

Plot summary

The book is framed as the reminiscence of an old man recalling the year he discovered love. It is written as a

first-person narrative A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from their own point of view using the first person It may be narrated by a first-person protagonist (or other focal character), first-person re-teller ...

. The novel opens with the protagonist, Hilary, a sixteen-year-old boy arriving at a grim East Anglian boarding school in 1962 after being twice expelled from previous institutions. He has no interest in study, no aptitude for sports and a great dislike of both pupils and teachers. He compares the school to a prison and finds life there unbearable. While slacking on a school cross-country run, he meets Finn, who lives alone in a beachside shack and sustains himself by fishing a