is the story of teenage Traveller Jack Joyce or Whack as he's known who must adapt to the settled life after his father moves the family into a house in a small Midlands town. A kind of Irish Huck Finn, Whack is more interested in working, hunting and courting than in school. But when he gets involved with the local guards and two settled girls, life suddenly becomes more complicated than he could have ever imagined ... Before long, Whack is on the run ... Peter Brady's stunning debut novel is a first in many respects: an acute and canny look at a unique Irish culture, and the first novel ever to be written in Travellers' cant. Combining the blunt black humour of a Patrick McCabe with the stripped-down realism of an Irvine Welsh, Brady delivers a moving story of adventure and young love in Ireland of the early Sixties, against a backdrop of exclusion and deadly consequence. This is a story about life in the margins richly peopled and sharply paced fiction as real as it gets.