Boy A - Jonathan Trigell

WINNER OF THE WORLD BOOK DAY - BOOKS TO TALK ABOUT PRIZE 2008 WINNER OF THE JOHN LLEWELLYN RHYS PRIZE 2005 WINNER OF THE WAVERTON GOOD READ PRIZE 2005
?A is for Apple. A bad apple.?
A man walks alongside a teenager called Jack. Nobody would suspect anything out of the ordinary. Unless they knew that Jack had chosen his own name from The Big Book of Boys? Names, or that he shed his old name along with his old life ? or tried to.
Jack has spent most of his young life in juvenile prison institutions. At 24, he is utterly innocent of the world, yet guilty of a monstrous childhood crime. How guilty? Who was the boy who committed that crime, and is he the same person who can now survive only by hiding his real identity?
To his new friends, he is a nice young man with occasional flashes of unexplained violence and fear. To his girlfriend, he is mysterious and strangely inexperienced. To an invisible lynchmob, he is someone to be closely watched and ultimately punished. And to himself, Jack is on permanent trial: can he make it? Can a person really start from scratch, forget the past, become someone else? Is a new name enough? Does he have a right to forget his own childhood, having taken someone else?s?
This searing and heartfelt novel perfectly captures Jack?s bewilderment and exhilaration as he approaches adulthood in his new world and the effect on him and those around him of media manipulated hysteria.
Boy A is a devastating indictment of society?s attempt to rehabilitate such children, while treating them as a species apart.