The Boy With No Shoes

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 is a pair of shoes, a present from the only person he feels has ever loved him. When they are cruelly taken from him, Jimmy spirals down into a state of loneliness and terrible loss which results in life-threatening illness. 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.

This triumphant story of a boy's survival from early trauma and his subsequent courageous journey into adulthood is based on bestselling novelist William Horwood's own remarkable childhood in south-east England after the Second World War. Horwood has created an inspiring story of childhood loss, personal survival and self-affirmation.

'The Boy With No Shoes' is the story of an extraordinary journey from a past too painful to imagine to a future every child deserves.