Paul Shannon 
Davey Darling 

This superb coming-of-age novel contains echoes of Ian Cross’s The God Boy. Both novels look at the world and family relationships through the eyes of a young boy on the brink of adolescence. Davey Ardsley is twelve years old, growing up in a working-class suburb of Christchurch in the early 1970s (Norman Kirk has just died) with a big, violent, hard-case father and a long-suffering mother. The fridge is always full of beer; his mother is always lighting another fag to have with her cup of tea. Davey is a bit of a hard-case himself, giving his father and Terry Appleby, the local thug, plenty of lip. One day Davey witnesses something he shouldn’t have and the repercussions that follow pitch the Ardsleys down a dark and tragic road. The outcome is that Davey has to choose between loyalty to his father or telling the truth.