In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live without a liver transplant. A novelist and poet, he lost nine years of his life as a vagrant alcoholic roaming the Mediterranean. This memoir is an account of his "lost" years: of addiction and reckless travel, serial hospitalizations, living under sentence of death, the life-saving gift of a hepatic graft, recovery, and at last, redemption via friendship, imagination, intellect, love, and fatherhood...