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MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Boys' own story of abuse and redemption
PAUL SIMON recommends a hard-hitting novel about young people at risk
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Home Boys
by Alex Wheatle
(Arcadia Books, £7.99)
THIS modern version of a Boy’s Own Story by Alex Wheatle follows convention at one level, with its pacey narrative of four friends who abscond together from their children’s home.
Spurred on by their pledge of loyalty to each other, Bullet, Carlton, Curvis and Glenroy outwit the authorities, face some of their own fears and re-establish, even if only for a while, a measure of control over their own lives.
But Wheatle, with his own experiences at the Shirley Oaks home where sexual abuse allegedly took place, uses the adventure genre to explore and explain the devastating consequences of children brought up in a largely loveless and at times abusive environment.
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