book cover of Pigeon English
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Pigeon English

(2011)
A novel by

 
 
Awards
Booker Prize Best Novel (nominee)
Desmond Elliott Prize Best Book (nominee)
Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang - the Dell Farm Crew - and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.

Genre: General Fiction

Praise for this book

"This boy's love letter to the world made me laugh and tremble all the way through." - Emma Donoghue

"A powerful and impressive novel... Utterly convincing and deeply moving." - Clare Morrall


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