A coming-of-age novel set in a rural English world of family pressure, farm labour, embarrassment, sexuality, class, and the cruelties of childhood.

Its narrator, Danny, moves through adolescence with a pig as both companion and burden: something loved, fed, hidden, managed, and eventually impossible to keep apart from the adult world of use, slaughter and shame. The novel has that particular British realist texture where ordinary life is not gentle at all — kitchens, fields, car parks, school routes, family silences, and the terrible intimacy of animals and children being raised under the same weather.

Good for readers of rural literary fiction, working-class/coming-of-age novels, and fiction where childhood is rendered as strange, physical and morally complicated rather than nostalgic. A nice companion, oddly, to books about animal life, masculinity and shame.

Sceptre paperback edition. Good condition. Contains a handwritten inscription on the title/half-title page, dated 2022 and signed by Andrew Cowan.