Sophie Gee

And then he juxtaposes that with these incredibly attentive descriptions of nature.

So the first sign we get that Billy...

Casper is a nature lover, is nothing to do with the hawk.

It's when he does his really, really early morning paper run.

And it's a kind of miserable affair, saved only by the fact that the stolen chocolate sort of keeps him company as he goes around.

But he comes out of someone's house, which is sort of a quite grand house, but it's very shabby.

And he notices a bird.

And this is how Hines describes it.

He unwrapped the last two squares of chocolate and looked back.

A thrush ran out from under a rhododendron shrub and started to tug on a worm from the soil between the loose asphalt chips.

It stood over the worm and tugged vertically, exposing its speckled throat and pointing its beak to the sky.

The worm stretched but held.

The thrush lowered its head and backed off, pulling at a more acute angle.

The worm still held, so the thrush stepped in and jerked at the slack.

The worm ripped out of the ground and the thrush ran away with it, back under the shrubs.

Billy flicked the chocolate wrapper through the gate and passed on.

It's a brilliant little capsule description, I think.

First of all, it's an allegory of what this book is about, which is about the predator-prey relationship that exists among birds.

It exists among the children in the school, among the teachers, among the families, the family hierarchy that Billy is involved with.

And then obviously at the national level, the predation system, the extractive system that has extracted labor and