Little Green Man.
Thirty-something Barney is out of work and bored. Estranged
from his wife and autistic son, Barney finds himself harking
back to the glory days of his seventies childhood, and the
bonds shared with his school friends Tony Football, Winkie,
Pompus and Stubbs: 'your mates with their dozy nicknames'
as his wife, Kim, calls them. Rummaging through his parents'
attic, amongst the Subbuteo figures and Scalextric cars, Barney
finds the very thing to bring them all back together again.
The Little Green Man is a precious jade statuette, which the
boys enacted dares to possess. Whoever had temporary ownership
of the statue, controlled the game.
Armed with the Little Green Man and a valuation certificate
for £750,000, Barney resurrects the childhood game of do-or-dare,
but this time around the stakes are a little higher. As the
dares become wilder, we learn the truth behind the boys' nicknames
and discover exactly what kind of men they have grown into.
The powerful totem of the Little Green Man causes secrets
from the past to be uncovered, and the friends' childhood
grudges steadily mutate into adult enmity and violence. But
who is controlling the game now?
Simon Armitage's first novel is a brilliant and razor-sharp
dissection of the dynamics of male friendship. He examines
the true nature of the ties that bind and the mind-games and
manipulation that can lurk behind the façade of friendship
- all in 'the salty prose of an original poetic voice' (Melvyn
Bragg, Observer).
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