Even though we’d grown up in vastly different cultures and countries, we’d both known poverty, domestic violence and the expectation that neither one of us would ever amount to anything. That was probably what united us more than anything: our shared defiance of that prediction.

She tap-danced on street corners for people’s small change. He was an out-of- work university teacher, poet and Vietnam vet. She was white and from Australia. He was black and from the Deep South. They met at Mardi Gras, New Orleans, in 1985. She was 22. He was nearly 40.

They fell in love. They married.

What happened next will thrill, move, perplex and enrage you. It will break your heart.

The Poet’s Wife confirms Sayer’s place as one of our most lyrical and most courageous writers - a memoirist like no other.