Reggie is a ten year old mixed race boy with a single mother and a nan who hides a dark secret. Life has always been tough with ominous visitors, fights and a killing, trouble always lurking. Constant anxiety of what he doesn’t understand.

This summer, though, things are about to change. 

The precinct outside Nan’s flat is the place where Reggie waits after school for Nan and then Mum to return from work. It is as he swings on the railings composing his rap that he meets Sonia. She, a commuter coming out of the train station, is surprised by this boy who appears to be serenading a face at the window of one of the flats. 

Sonia, whose story runs in parallel, is an intern in a publishing company. Men belittle her work, the aftermath of the pandemic limits her knowledge of the other employees, and a general cynicism and malaise clouds her experience. Has she made a terrible mistake?  Will there be a job for her at the end of the year? It is Reggie’s welcome that delights and restores her each evening. And it is due to Reggie’s curiosity that she finds somewhere to live, a room of her own.

Ernie is an elderly allotment holder, who Reggie befriends on his walk back from school. Ernie grumbles over the state of his plot and life in general. His past life was blighted by his dead wife’s illness. Together, he and Reggie, build a greenhouse. 

The library is a sanctuary where Reggie finds Darren, a new librarian. The young man helps him find the photo of his namesake which Nan is always ‘going on about’. 

Reggie is bullied at school, no one wishes to be his friend. That is until a Ukrainian refugee joins his class and he is chosen to be his ‘buddy’.

At first Reggie keeps these blossoming friendships to himself. How can he ‘let on’ to Mum and Nan, who are both fearful of the council, the ‘social’, and suspicious of strangers in general? Nan tells him how beer can kill slugs but when he finds and saves half full cans of lager to offer to Ernie, it causes a terrible row between Mum and Nan. A drunken man, purporting to be a friend of Nan, terrifies him, and he is alarmed by and jealous of Mum’s new boyfriend. Most urgently he wants to know who and where is his own dad. 

It is through his quest for this knowledge, his desire to make his Mum and Nan happy, and to please these new friends, that he brings them all together. By the end of this novel he has changed lives, created a new community, and grown in confidence.