Told through the voice of eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku, a recent immigrant from Ghana living on a London housing estate, Pigeon English is one of those rare novels that manages to be both exuberant and devastating.

Harrison decides to investigate the murder of a local boy, treating it with the seriousness of a detective story, while the reader gradually understands dangers and tensions he cannot yet fully see. Harrison's narration is funny, curious, inventive and relentlessly alive, filtering everything through the logic of childhood. The result is a novel that captures the excitement of friendship, migration, belonging and discovery while simultaneously exposing the violence, poverty and precarity that surround him. The gap between what Harrison understands and what the reader understands creates much of the book's emotional force.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011, Pigeon English sits alongside novels such as Room and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in its use of a youthful narrator, but its concerns are distinctly contemporary: race, class, urban life and the fragile optimism of childhood. A moving and unexpectedly funny novel that lingers long after the final page.

First edition paperback published by Bloomsbury in 2011. Very good condition with light shelf wear consistent with age. Clean and tightly bound throughout.