Sixteen-year-old Josh’s father was killed in the suicide bombing of a train, while he was going to work. This challenging novel chronicles the grief of Josh and his mother and also the attempt to radicalise Josh made by a group of white supremacists.
The judges for The Branford Boase Award commented: ‘An unflinching exploration of an important subject’; ‘I felt really immersed in it’; ‘a powerful read’; ‘there’s a sense of raw newness’.
A white supremacist group and its violent leader targets teenage Josh, who is struggling to cope with his father's recent death at the hands of terrorists. Will he find the strength to resist, or will his unlikely relationship with Dana give them both the escape that they so badly need?
An unflinching and muscular exploration of grief, and what we plant in the spaces that loss leaves inside us, Grow is a tense and compelling novel of our current social landscape.
Luke Palmer is a poet, author and secondary school teacher, and a graduate of the Bath Spa Creative Writing course. He lives in Wiltshire with his young family. Grow is his first novel.
