Sandy Balfour, South African by birth, but foreign in other countries since his 21st birthday, writes his memoir which he links inextricably with crosswords. It has a strange disembodied quality to it. It is almost as though Balfour is narrating someone elses life. It is reflective of the crosswords he adores, that sometimes the clues have layers to them, just like his life seems to be. Nothing, like a cryptic crossword, is straightfoward.It is a slow and layered biography which seems to be at times oa series of interlinked anecdotes about what happened in his life and how it fits in with the crossword clues of that time. Even the title of the book is a crossword clue and reflects his life.For those clues he doesn't solve, or even the ones where the answer is in the text there is a page in the back which talks about how to solve the particular clue, in case you didn't understand how the answer of reached. So you get the double benefit of learning to solve cryptic crosswords, if you didn't already know.I quite liked this book. It was quite a different type of read but enjoyable and I found it oddly compelling. It wasn't that Balfour was a sympathetic character, or even Oprah-like in his confessions. It was such an unusual book and well written which made it so interesting. My only distraction was the at times jerky connection of events which, in the context of a crossword are fine, but didn't work as well for the connection of a series of life events.