My Name is Leon

"Yes. Leon is a nine-year-old boy who is taken into care because his mother can’t look after him. She’s his white parent; he has a Black parent, his father, who is absent. He also has a baby half-brother who is white. That’s very significant in the story, because one of the things that becomes apparent is that the baby is much more likely to be adopted permanently. Leon is desperate to hold his family together. We see everything through his eyes. That’s one of the very clever things about the novel; it’s in the third person, but it’s still written for the most part in the language of a child. So the reader is positioned so that they understand far, far more than Leon possibly can about his circumstances. It makes for a really poignant story. That’s one of the reasons I included it. “There has been a strong Black presence in Britain since Roman times” It’s very touching. I don’t often feel this about books, partly because—having worked in higher education for many years—I have quite an academic edge when I’m reading, a lot of the time. But I was really drawn to this on a visceral level.I really felt for this boy and found myself willing him to succeed and to get the things in life that he needed. I thought a lot about how that was achieved in the writing. I think it’s to do with the real compassion in the way that it’s written, a kind of tenderness, almost, that you don’t often see sustained in fiction. I felt both moved and excited by it. Because at one level it seems like a straightforward novel, not particularly complex. But it achieves so much. It’s so humane. I think it is a very complex novel. Not many novels can do that. It did seem incredibly well-informed about the processes that children had to go through at that time. Which gave it a kind of authenticity. I’m always worried about using the term ‘authenticity’, because of course it’s a construct. But because of the subject matter, it really needed to be believable to succeed. And it was, for all these reasons."