Boy: One Child's Fight to Survive in the Brutal British Care System
Boy: One Child's Fight to Survive in the Brutal British Care System
Paperback – December 1, 2015
by
Nigel Cooper
Price
$7.80
Format
Paperback
Pages
320
Publisher
Ebury Press
Publication Date
December 1, 2015
ISBN-13
978-1785030789
Dimensions
5 x 0.9 x 8 inches
Weight
8.1 ounces
Description
"Visceral, heart-wrenching and utterly compelling" -xa0Mikey Walsh, author of the international best-selling G ypsy Boy Nigel Cooper spent nine years in the British care system before educating himself and becoming an author of contemporary fiction and crime. He found his voice as the editor of his own magazine, which he ran for eight years. Prior to this he studied screenwriting in London. He also has a wealth of experience as a freelance journalist.
Features & Highlights
- “My parents had to try for eighteen months to conceive me, but my father was adamant he wanted one last child. After eighteen months of trying, my mother eventually conceived and nine months later I was born. My birth was a difficult one. It was like I was never meant to be in this world.”
- Boy
- is Nigel Cooper’s memoir from the age of five to 16. It tells the shocking, brutal, disturbing, emotional story of his childhood spent in and out of various care homes and institutions during the 1970s and 1980s. When Nigel was just seven years old, after the untimely death of his sister and father, his mother asked social services to take him away—and then his nightmare began. For the next nine years of his life, Nigel was repeatedly rejected by his mother and spent his childhood among bullies, abusers, psychopaths, and criminals. He spent time in a children’s psychiatric hospital, where they carried out unimaginable tests, pumped him full of drugs, and physically abused him; care homes, where he would come face to face with rough estate kids who would beat him up, force him to steal for them, and threaten his life; and barbaric assessment centers for disturbed and delinquent children, where the staff were, at times, sicker than the children. The system tried to break Nigel and it was a miracle that he survived. The British care system robbed him of his childhood. His story is truly extraordinary and will do a lot more than shed light on what it was like growing up during the Jimmy Savile years.
- Boy
- is powerfully written, edgy, gripping, and beautifully crafted.
