James Hanley was born an in Dublin in 1901 an Irish Catholic and brought up in Liverpool, which he left early, spending the formative years of his youth in the merchant navy.

From 1930 he published 48 books, including one excursion into autobiography, BROKEN WATER and one documentary on the situation of coal-miners in the thirties, GREY CHILDREN.

His work received considerable critical acclaim. E.M. Forster called him "a novelist of distinction and originality". His novels include BOY, THE FURYS, THE HOLLOW SEA, THE OCEAN, THE WELSH SONATA and LEVINE.

His last four books - ANOTHER WORLD, WOMAN IN THE SKY, A DREAM JOURNEY and A KINGDOM - were published during the last decade of his life, after a long break from novel-writing when he concentrated on plays for BBC Radio.

He died in 1985.

Acclaimed by luminaries such as William Faulkner and EM Forster, suppressed for more than fifty years by a prosecution for obscenity, James Hanley's 1930s classic charts the short and brutish life of a boy forced out of school and into the unforgiving world of work. Escape - in the form of stowing away on a ship - only deepens his exposure to the squalor and brutality that men are capable of, and when he arrives in Alexandria he learns there are some things that one can't run away from.

Narrated in unflinching language that is both visceral and acute in its observational power, Boy is a shocking book that stays in the mind long after it is read.

"James Hanley's genius is evident in Boy" The Times

"Hanley's brilliance is to shock us whatever our level of sophistication, and make us believe in this frail youth with his paradoxical inner strength" The Evening Standard