When Neil Cross was five years old, his mother left him. No note, no phone call, just an empty house and a browbeaten father. Two years later, she came back for her son. She was not alone.
Neil's new stepfather was a South-African white supremacist. He was a serial adulterer, a thief, a con man, a racist and a liar. And in many ways, he was the perfect father. In their backstreet Edinburgh slum, Derek Cross introduced Neil to Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped, and The Three Musketeers, and whilst his stepson battled violent anti-English racism everyday in the playground, Derek discovered a new way to isolate his family; he became a Mormon Bishop in the Church of the Latter Day Saints.
This is a story about being raised a racist and an outsider - and overcoming it; about family and stepfamily; about class and religion; and about how resentment breeds violence. And it's about what, in the end, the love of books can do for you.
