Book description
Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister,
eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of
flats on an inner-city housing estate. The second best runner in the
whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised
trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully
unaware of the very real threat all around him.
With
equal fascination for the local gang - the Dell Farm Crew - and the
pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements
of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks
of inner-city survival.
But when a boy is knifed to
death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only
silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In
doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun
around her family to try and keep them safe.
A story
of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon
English
is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the
edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way
he falls. Stephen Kelman was born in Luton in 1976. After finishing
his degree he
worked variously as a warehouse operative, a careworker, and in
marketing and local government administration. He decided to pursue his
writing seriously in 2005, and has completed several feature screenplays
since then. Pigeon English
is his first novel.
