How The Trouble Started, Faber, July the 5th 2012.

The police were involved over the trouble. They had to be. ‘I was just playing,’ I told them, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted to know what I understood by ‘intent’.

Donald Bailey is sixteen. He can’t forget the trouble that happened when he was eight, when the police were called. His mother can’t forget either and even leaving their home town doesn’t help. Then Donald befriends Jake, who is eight years old and terrifyingly vulnerable. As he tries to protect him, Donald fails to see the most obvious danger. And that the trouble might be closer than he thinks…

Following Robert Williams’s prize-winning debut Luke and Jon, How The Trouble Started is a dark, gripping novel about childhood, morality and the loneliness of children and adults. Told with Robert Williams’s characteristic warmth, humanity and deceptively light touch, it is a story about how our best and worse intentions can lead us astray, and the moments we can never leave behind.**

** Please note, I am not talking about myself in the third person. This is a copy and paste job of the catalogue copy written by someone else. And whilst it is a wonderful thing when people do talk about themselves in the third person, I just can’t pull it off. I’m no Rio Ferdinand. Or Andrew Stone.