Billy Casper is fifteen, growing up in a South Yorkshire mining town where almost every institution around him has already decided what sort of life he will have.

At home he is neglected; at school he is mocked, punished and treated as essentially disposable; ahead lies the coal mine and the same constricted working life as the men around him. Then Billy finds a kestrel.

First published in 1968 as A Kestrel for a Knave, Barry Hines’s novel is one of the great works of postwar British working-class fiction: spare, unsentimental and acutely attentive to the ways class becomes destiny long before anyone formally chooses it. Billy’s training of the bird gives him something almost absent elsewhere in his life — a private field of competence, concentration and freedom. The novel was adapted by Ken Loach into the 1969 film Kes, which became a landmark of British social-realist cinema. 

Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1975. Paperback. Originally published by Michael Joseph in 1968; first Penguin edition 1969. 1975 Penguin reprint, film tie-in edition for Ken Loach’s Kes. Moderate age toning, rubbing and handling to covers, with light creasing and edge wear; internally clean and sound. Good to very good condition.