When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now.
From the double Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace, an astonishing novel of new beginnings and the troubles of youth. 'Brilliant... Tenaciously absorbing' Daily Telegraph
David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolìvar to watch over him.
But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. Yet it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of.
The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives.
'Compelling, often very funny, full of sudden depths' Observer