Sam Coley

and ends up getting in a lot of trouble.

And he and Anthony's lives just intersect at various points where they continually cause, you know, a lot of trouble for each other, ultimately kind of ruining each other.

Yeah, that's probably a spoiler.

Yeah, it's almost like, and I'm always really drawn to stories that work this way, and the one that springs to mind is No Country for Old Men, but in that way where there's one

incident that seems to set the fates in motion for everybody and i i'm always really drawn to this idea of like an inescapable fate especially when it's a one incident from which you can never escape and that kind of permeates through the novel where it has a knock-on effect but also yeah as you say to the sides there's all this social realism so

you know, his father is an alcoholic and then manages to stop being an alcoholic and then laps back into alcoholism again.

Everyone kind of ends up unhappy.

And I felt like by the end of the novel, and I hope it's not a spoiler to say this, but everybody ended up exactly where they were always going to end up.

It was almost like, it really was this idea of like not really ever being able to escape where you

where you came from and who your parents are and, you know, where you were born or where your parents were born or those kinds of social issues.

Yeah.

I'm a huge fan of tricking people.

So if the blurb was intended to lure people into reading it as a light and easy beach read over summer, then absolutely did its job.

Because, yeah, it really doesn't quite describe what the novel is.

And I thought where the author really, you know, I have a few

post-it flags stuck in my copy of the book.

And where I really, really fell in love with that was these incredible observations of the mother, Helene, or the father's life when he's by himself or these kind of – it was almost like the narrator removes himself one step further than the fairly close third person that it usually is.

And it would just be like a paragraph or half a page of this –

Incredible observation of whether it's of puberty or of motherhood or poverty or unemployment or the unions or whatever it was, France and the World Cup.

That was where I really got into the novel, which was good because 14-year-olds in love is not normally popular.