Children of the Sun

1970: Fourteen-year-old Tony becomes seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It's a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is explosively risky. 2003: James is a young TV researcher, living with his boyfriend. At a loose end, he begins to research the far right in Britain and its secret gay membership. He becomes particularly fascinated by Nicky Crane, the leader of the movement who came out as gay before dying of Aids in 1993. The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the 1970s, '80s and '90s, as the skinhead movement splinters and weakens, and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research, making contact with individuals on far-right websites and receiving threatening phone calls. And then the lives of these two very different heroes unforgettably intersect... Children of the Sun is a work of great imaginative sympathy and range - a novel of unblinking honesty but also of deep feeling, which illuminates the surprisingly thin line that separates aggression from tenderness and offers us a picture of a Britain that is strange and yet utterly convincing.