Billy Casper is a boy with nowhere to go and nothing to say; part of the limbo generation of school leavers too old for lessons and too young to know anything about the outside world. He hates and is hated. His family and friends are mean and tough and they're sure he's going to end up in big troubl[...]

With prose that is every bit as raw, intense and bitingly honest as the world it depicts, Barry Hines' "A Kestrel for a Knave" contains a new afterword by the author in "Penguin Modern Classics". Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mini[...]

He has nowhere to go and nothing to say... Troubled teenager Billy Casper lives in a Yorkshire mining town.  He is treated as a failure at school and his family and friends don't give a damn.  His hopes, his future, mean nothing to anyone - least of all Billy.  When he finds Kes, a Kestrel hawk, [...]