Slowly he discovers that his dad, Wes, shares similar dreams: both of them have been scribbling away in secret, making sure that the gorgonish Ruth, their mother and wife respectively, doesn’t find out and trample on their dreams, as she has a habit of doing. He dreams of being a celebrated writer when he grows up. The tale’s told by Charlie in the present tense. Some parents might have a fit if they discovered their kids reading it.) (Bizarrely, it’s published in the US by Knopf under the aegis of Random House Children’s Books. And, like To Kill a Mockingbird, although it has youthful protagonists it’s really a novel for grownups.

Really it’s a sort of noirish version of To Kill a Mockingbird - a parallel the novel itself is at pains to point out, with Charlie frequently trying to think things through “the way Atticus Finch would” and even comparing his own dad to Atticus.

There’s really quite a lot more plot in this engrossingly tangled coming-of-age novel, although I’m reluctant to use the term “coming-of-age” in connection with it. Complicating matters for Charlie is that for years he’s adored from afar Eliza Wishart, the dead Laura’s younger sister, and now it’s becoming apparent that, defying his credulity, she likes him right back. Top of their list of suspects is Mad Jack Lionel, the recluse who lives on the outskirts of town and who, it’s Known For A Fact, murdered a girl years ago. So he and Charlie hide the corpse and decide to try to track down the real killer themselves. He’s found the beaten body of local girl Laura Wishart hanging from a tree in the remote forest, and knows that - as a half-Aboriginal - he’ll be accused of her murder and convicted before you could sneeze should the body be discovered. One night yet another outcast, the somewhat older Jasper Jones, comes to Charlie’s bedroom window begging for help. His best and only friend is Jeffrey Lu, who’s an outcast because he’s of Vietnamese extraction and Australian troops are dying in the war there. It’s December 1965 in the small Australian town of Corrigan, and 13-year-old Charlie Bucktin is an outcast because he’s bright, reads copiously and is pretty lousy at sports.

Jasper jones book