BOY WITH NO SHOES: A MEMOIR

the long version

"Five-year-old Jimmy Rova is the unwanted child of a mother who rejects him, and whose other children bully him. The one thing he can call his own is a pair of shoes, a present from the only person he feels has ever loved him. When they are cruelly taken away, Jimmy spirals down into a state of loneliness and terrible loss from which there seems no recovery." " His life begins to change with the arrival of his grandmother from Africa and their move to a dilapidated house in the fishing quarter of an east Kent coastal town. In the close-knit community of its narrow streets and wind-swept shore, Jimmy discovers at last how to love and be loved." "This triumphant story of a boy'struggle with early trauma and his remarkable journey into adulthood is based on bestselling novelist William Horwood's own heartbreaking boyhood in south-east England after the Second World War." - BOOK JACKET>