Tom Boler

Nine-year-old Tom Boler comes back from school one day to find his mother gone. What happens next is his story - told in his naive, trusting, baffled voice - as he negotiates a new, perilous, adult world. He is visited by Uncle Dustman, who stores the rubbish bags he collects in Tom's house, while watching donkey-porn on the video; he is adopted briefly by Primula Spatula, a posh dipsomaniac, and has a run-in with bad boys in the park and a corpse in a burgled house, before being retrieved by the mysterious Boxford. Boxy is black and gay and claims he's been told to look after Tom. He lives with Roxy, who is also black, and also a man, but who dresses as a woman. 'I'm Roxy,' he says, 'I'm your new mum.' Then Tom's real adventures begin. One of the funniest and most original stylists to have emerged in British fiction during the past decade, Daren King looks obliquely at the inner-city world of ecstasy, sexual promiscuity and sexual confusion, class conflict and poverty - all through the wide-open eyes of nine-year-old Tom: very innocent, but very eager to try it all.