Product details
- ISBN 9781350171916
- Weight: 102g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 27 Jan 2022
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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An eye for an eye. It’s very simple. You choose your homeland like a hyena picking and choosing where he steals his next meal from. Scavenger. Yes you grovel to the feet of Mengistu and when his people spit at you and kick you from the bowl you scuttle across the border. Scavenger.
As a violent civil war rages back home in Ethiopia, teenager Alem and his father are in a bed and breakfast in Berkshire. It's his best holiday ever. The next morning his father is gone and has left a note explaining that he and his mother want to protect Alem from the war. This strange grey country of England is now his home.
On his own, and in the hands of the social services and the Refugee Council, Alem lives from letter to letter, waiting to hear something from his father. Then he meets car-obsessed Mustapha, the lovely 'out-of-your-league' Ruth and dangerous Sweeney – three unexpected allies who spur him on in his fight to be seen as more than just the Refugee Boy.
Lemn Sissay's remarkable stage adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah's bestselling novel is published here in the Methuen Drama Student Edition series, featuring commentary & notes by Professor Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) that help the student unpack the play's themes, language, structure and production history to date.
Lemn Sissay is a musician, a stand-up comedian, radio and television producer, a playwright and a poet. In 2019, he won the PEN Pinter Prize.
Benjamin Zephaniah is a high-profile international author, well known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults and ground-breaking performance poetry for children, as well as his novels for young people, including Face, Refugee Boy, Gangsta Rap and Teacher's Dead. He was included in The Times' list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008.
Lynette Goddard is Professor of Black Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
