What I'm reading
Past Years' Reading here...
February 2024
The Bee Sting Paul Murray
The Wren, the Wren Anne Enright
The Safekeep Yael van der Wouden
Brother.Do.You.Love.Me Manni & Reuben Coe
January 2024
North Woods Daniel Mason
The Eight Mountains Paolo Cognetti
Doppelganger Naomi Klein
The Instrumentalist Harriet Constable
WHAT I'M WORKING ON
On 3rd January 1826 an old man called Joe the Quilter was brutally, inexplicably murdered in this isolated cottage in the north of England. No one was ever found guilty of Joe’s death. How does such an event affect the surrounding community? That’s what I’ve set out to explore, through my created heroine, Dizzy Agnes.
New Boy Reading Group Guide
You can download the Book Club Kit for New Boy on the Hogarth Press website here
Where to buy New Boy
Background for New Boy
Like most students, my own school playground experience was at times fraught. Unusually, I grew up in an integrated neighborhood in 1960s and 1970s Washington DC, and went to a school where the majority of the students were black. So I knew what it was like to walk onto a playground where my skin color was different from many of the others, and the tension that could cause.
I chose to set New Boy in 1974, when I – and my characters – was 11 years old and in my last year of elementary school. At that age kids are on the verge of adolescence – that strange period when they begin imitating adult behavior without actually being adults. The main characters simply go through the motions of romance (which is how I’ve always felt about Othello and Desdemona anyway), but the real drama is in how someone different from everyone else is treated.
Unfortunately racism has always been prevalent in the US. From slavery onwards, African-Americans have long been discriminated against. The Civil Rights Movement sought racial equality in the 1950s. The more militant Black Power Movement grew in the late 1960s and into the 1970s and, interwoven with the slowly declining Vietnam
War and the Watergate scandal, made the year of 1974 less stable than its culture full of bellbottoms and big hair might indicate.
New Boy - The Story and its Inspiration
Two years ago I was asked by Hogarth Press to take part in their Shakespeare Project, in which writers are invited to write a novel inspired by a Shakespeare play. I chose Othello, for its timeless themes of jealousy and discrimination. I like writing about outsiders.
For once, I did not have to make up a story or characters; I simply had to choose the setting and adapt the story to it. Where in the world can you find passion, jealousy, discrimination, and betrayal, all in one intense place? Why, look no further than a school playground.
One day diplomat’s son Osei Kokote walks on to an all-white playground – his fourth school in as many years. He knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day – so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl.
The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard, where kids fall in and out of love before lunchtime and practice a casual racism picked up from the adults around them. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again.
If you'd like to read an excerpt of New Boy, Shakespeare's Globe theatre in London have posted one here on their blog.