Boy A

by  Jonathan Trigell
published by  Serpent’s Tail
price  £7.99 Jack has spent most of his life in juvenile prisons, but he’s about to be released with a new name, a new job and a new life. At 24, he is utterly innocent of the world, yet guilty of a monstrous childhood crime.

To his new friends, he is a good guy with occasional flashes of unexplained violence. To his girlfriend, he is strangely naïve and unreachable. To his case worker, he’s a victim of the system and of media driven hysteria. To himself, Jack is on permanent trial: he struggles to start from scratch, forget the past, become someone else. A searing and heartfelt novel, Boy A won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

The perfect novel for book groups and anyone who enjoys getting to grips with difficult issues in their reading, Boy A is about whether the rehabilitation of children who commit crime is the right thing for society, how we fail such children, and whether it is ever really possible to change the path of a disturbed child.

In a world where the media artificially ages photographs in order to try to locate released perpetrators who are hiding under a new identity, and where tabloid campaigns result in vigilante groups pursuing people they believe are guilty of terrible crimes, Boy A examines whether in fact it is us who owe a debt to such children, and whether they deserve our sympathy or our scorn.

Though it did win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Boy A is still a very low profile book, which we firmly believe deserves wider attention. As controversial as Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, it has the potential to engage readers in lively moral discussions and encourage them to examine their own attitudes to such situations.