Sam Coley

When school started, he would be in year 10.

It tells you everything you need to know about him without saying anything

you know, he's this tall, he had brown hair, he had blue eyes or whatever, you know, and having been and often accused of still acting like a teenage boy myself, I knew immediately who he was and where he was in relation to his family and the world around him.

So I really loved the way that the author introduces characters and manages to describe their personalities in these very sparse, but at the same time,

very three-dimensional waves.

Not at all.

Yeah, the blurb kind of says they, well, what they do is steal a canoe and go off to spy on girls.

And so, yeah, you absolutely think it's going to be this kind of romance novel.

you know, will they, won't they kind of across a few years story.

But it's, no, it's really not that at all.

It's much more of a, I guess, it's not a saga in the way that Song of the Crocodile is, but it almost is in terms of it's set over eight years and each section is two years apart.

So, you know, and it's all, so it's summer 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998.

And those eight years, you know, for 14-year-old Anthony, that is like the saga of his, you know, his formative teenage upbringing.

The plot almost becomes secondary to what I think where the book shines through, which is as a portrait of this world that he inhabits in France in the 1990s, very industrial.

As you said, working class, unemployment is high.

Racial tensions are very high.

you know, the people clashing with the union, that kind of thing.

And as an observational piece or as a portrait of that kind of world, I thought that's where it was strongest.

So he's a, okay, so Hussein is a Moroccan, like of Moroccan parentage.

So he lives with his father in a, I think like a social heralding block in the city and gets into trouble as kind of an outsider.