Clay

Product Description

A boy creeps down from a high-rise block in the half-light of dawn to see the neat prints left by a fox on the frosty grass. He is TC, eight years old & skipping school to spend his time exploring the city's waste ground & long-forgotten wild corners. At school & at home he is barely missed. Sophia, seventy-eight & a half & still wearing her dear dead husband's shoes, looks out through her kitchen window at the little city park outside her flat, its grassy acres grimy & litter-blown, but to her eyes beautiful. She is writing her weekly letter to her granddaughter Daisy, whose privileged upbringing means she exists in a different world to that of TC, even though they live less than a mile apart. Jozef spends his days clearing houses & works night shifts at the local takeaway, but he is unable to forget the farm he left behind in Pol&, the woods & fields he grew up with still a part of him, although he is a thousand miles away. When he meets TC in the little park one night he finds a kindred spirit, despite the forty years between them: both lonely, both looking for something, both lost.A lyrical debut novel about innocence & experience, class & consumerism, Clay captures the delicate balance of life in the city, between young & old, between nature & development, between recklessness & caution.