Impressive debut novel
Stephen Kelman’s Booker Prize-shortlisted debut is a coming-of-age tale that succeeds in large part due to the captivating voice of its narrator, 11-year-old Harrison Okupu. Harri, accompanied by his mother and older sister, has recently settled in an inner-city London estate, leaving his father and infant sister back in his native Ghana, and he is in many ways a typical boy, if a somewhat sensitive one.
He is a stranger in a strange land, and compared with the rose-tinted idyll that he has left behind, this new world is a vividly rendered melting pot of addicts, youth gangs, poverty and senseless violence, a forgotten square of waste ground where school kids play games of ‘Suicide Bomber’ and where old people get mugged in broad daylight.
