There are books that make you squirm. That bring an old, sick feeling back to your stomach. That make you want to climb back under the covers and and not come out until the book has gone away. Pretty much anything that covers going to school in the eighties and bullying and awkwardness and general cluelesness will do it for me.

Back Swan Green covers a year in the life of a boy in 1982. There is family discord. There's a big sister. There's bullies and mad mates and music and books and holidays and fairs and burgeoning literary ambition. It's a year of terror and transformation. magic and disillusionment, loss and enrichment, growth and change, loneliness and embarrassment, poetry and first kisses. It's brilliant, and if it had bee an iota less brilliant I wouldn't have been able to read it. Thanks for all the trauma, David Mitchell. It was epic.