Luke and Jon

Luke and Jon
By Robert Williams
Faber £6.99, 192 pages
FT Bookshop price: £5.59

Like many classic stories of childhood, Robert Williams’ Luke and Jon is told with an outsider’s eye: cool and clear, and hiding deep emotion behind a carapace of coping.

After the death of his mother in a car crash, 13-year-old Luke moves to a ramshackle house in the country on the outskirts of a northern English industrial town. While his toymaker father deals with his loss by drinking heavily and sculpting a giant wooden horse, Luke takes consolation from painting on the fells.

It takes the appearance of Jon, an unworldly child with 1950s dress sense, who is bullied by his classmates, to help shake father and son from their grief.

Robert Williams’ first novel – winner of a prize for unpublished writers – holds few surprises. But the language with which he recounts this tale of friendship and survival seems newly minted. The kind of book that reminds you why, as a child, you first started reading novels.