Book excerpt: Five-year-old Jimmy Rova is the unwanted child of a mother who rejects him, growing up among half-siblings who 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. Only the arrival of his grandmother, and their move to a dilapidated house in the old fishing quarter of an east Kent coastal town - where the warm-hearted community befriends Jimmy and shows him how to love and be loved - reveals a way out. Based on his own remarkable childhood in south-east England after the Second World War and using all the skills that went into the creation of his modern classics Duncton Wood, Skallagrigg and The Willows in Winter, Horwood has created an inspiring story of childhood loss, personal survival and self-affirmation.