It's summer, and it's hot. Liam is on the edge of his teenage years, wandering with his best friend Max through his coutry Northumberland home town in a landscape rural and idyllic but defined by conflict, Border Reivers, Romans, soldiers on exercises and jets screaming overhead as Blair and Bush take the UK into war in the Middle East, trying to avoid the savage bully Nattrass.
They are playing in the garden when Liam digs up an old knife and indulges in the fantasy of it being an ancient relic. But a chattering jackdaw yelling at them as they wander the village seems far more intent, they follow it and find an abandoned months old baby. Taking it home they become overnight celebrities and the baby changes their lives in small ways, like the pebbles that start an avalanche.
As the baby, now named Alison, is fostered Max and Liam begin to grow apart as their interests diverge, and visiting Alison brings Max into contact with foster children Crystal, orphaned by fire, and Oliver, a Liberian war refugee. Liam is largely left to his own devices by his writer father and artist mother and the bruising war games he plays with the other boys of the village lead to the climax in the hills above the village.
Almond writes with a deceptive simplicity, the narrative is told by Liam and has the directness of a young boy's experiences, but there is a complex web of themes and nuances about war, savagery, responsibility, conflict, innocence and childhood.
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