The brutally honest memoir of physical and sexual abuse, drug addiction, crime, and ultimate redemption.


Mark Johnson's father had "LOVE" tattooed across his left hand, but that didn't stop the beatings. The Johnson children would turn up to school battered and bruised, but no one ever investigated their home life. Mark just slipped through the cracks and kept on falling. For years.


Brought up in a home simmering with dark secrets, Mark began stealing at the age of six, was drinking by the age of eight, and took his first hit of heroin when he was eleven. A sensitive and intelligent boy, art college beckoned, but he ended up in a violent prison instead. With searing honesty, Wasted documents Mark's spiraling descent into the very depths of addiction and criminality. Hooked on heroin and crack, homeless on the streets of London with a price on his head, no one—least of all Mark—believed he would ever survive, never mind recover.


And yet he somehow found the strength to pull himself back from the precipice while also helping other recovering addicts. His story is at once horrifying and inspirational—a heartbreaking account of one man's struggle to save himself, and help save others in the process.