Wreckage

In "Wreckage," timid Alaistair and cock-of-the-walk Darren, who appared in Griffiths's previous book, "Stump," return to Liverpool, having battered senseless the "ahl biddy" in a post office near Wrexham. Alastair, whose grandmother is mortally ill in Liverpool, has no words for his grief at the trespass behind him, but possesses the heart and marrow to feel it. The narrative leaps back and forward in time, to show these boy children as the product of history and education. The scousers are children of dispossession and the Celtic diaspora. One 19th-century ancestor murdered to escape Ireland; Alastair's dying nan is an exile from Wales. "Wreckage is a tragicomic lament for the generations of rejects and hopefuls who fetched up in the erstwhile "muddy pool" of Liverpool.