The frustration of everyone involved in a biography — from the author, the reader, and the subject (if he or she is still living) — is the inability of the form to capture the essence of the subject, the "real" person who lurks inside a dense cocoon of facts, statistics, family connections, resumes, observations, interviews, letters, and photographs. Ronald Reagan’s biographer, Edmund Morris, was so baffled by his famously opaque subject that he resorted to writing a novel instead (Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, 1999).

Alexander Masters was similarly baffled by his subject, a British man named Stuart Shorter, though not because his subject was famous, controversial, undocumented, or remote in time. Stuart was very much alive during the writing of his biography, very forthcoming with the details of his life, and had a large hand in shaping the book into its final form. The problem was that Stuart was a member of what Masters terms "the chaotic homeless," with the emphasis on chaotic.

Stuart's homelessness stretched from his teens into his thirties, broken by stints in juvenile homes, prisons, hostels, and government housing. The only consistent theme in his life was chaos: a sociopathic father, an abandoned education, petty crimes, then more serious crimes, mental illness, and substance abuse.

Masters met Stuart while working at a day-center in Cambridge, UK. He formed the idea that by telling one man's story, he might somehow come to understand the causes of chronic homelessness. Masters' first attempts, full of footnotes and theorizing, put Stuart right off: "It's bollocks boring." He wants something more like a Tom Clancy thriller, so he suggests, "Do it the other way ‘round. Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards."

So was born Stuart: A Life Backwards.

It isn't all grim. Despite his problems, Stuart retains a sense of humor and reveals glimmers of sharp intelligence that belie years of sniffing glue, alcoholism, and antipsychotic medication. Many reviewers have found the book "funny," even "hilarious," but there is so much pain here: Stuart's pain, the pain of those who try to help Stuart, and even Masters' pain. Sometimes Masters wishes Stuart would just die; he's that difficult and his problems are that intractable. By his very nature he proves a slippery subject for standard biography, even a backwards one. Masters demands of him, "But some sense of time – you must have had that?"

"Nah. Some minutes was long, other minutes was short. I know that. Sometimes I was in the park, sometimes I wasn't. Sometimes I was in a cell, sometimes I wasn't. Sometimes, which were supposed to be weeks and months – I don't think they happened at all."

Masters' research eventually takes him back to the event or events that "murdered the boy I was." The truth is that Stuart was murdered, again and again, by the people who should have taken the best care of him, by a system erected to protect children like him, by a criminal justice system that processes men like him, and finally by a world that could make no place for him.

The "backwards" approach creates a strong sense of suspense, though occasionally the narrative is unnecessarily confusing. This is a small fault in an otherwise masterful piece of work. Stuart will touch you deeply and leave you with more understanding of those hard cases whom a famous teacher once called "the least of these my brothers."