What I Was by Meg RosoffViking Penguin, 2008 (originally Puffin, 2007)

It’s the middle of the 21st century and East Anglia’s sinking into the sea. (But the coastline’s always shifted; there have always been ruins and layers beneath.) H, who is 100, thinks back to his own not-so-buried past: to his time at a boarding school on the coast, the year he was sixteen, the year he fell in love. This is a story about living on the edges of places and times and worlds, stepping outside of the day-to-day, and it’s full of the rush of that, and the rush of love, and perfect solid descriptions of the sea and the town market and an old fishing hut just off the beach.