Here I Am! - Paperback

by Pauline Holdstock (Author)

A 49^th Shelf Editors' Pick

MyMum said sometimes refugees don't eat anything for days and days. Sometimes weeks and months so I am really lucky. I think she exaggerates. But I think she is right about the lucky bit. Or maybe not. Sometimes I forget that MyMum is dead. But that is probably better than remembering.

When Frankie's mother dies, he tells his teacher, of course. But he can't seem to get anyone at his school in southern England to listen to him. So the six-year-old comes up with a plan: go to France, find a police station, and ask the officers to ring his father. Thus a stowaway's view of the sea opens Giller-nominated Pauline Holdstock's eighth novel, narrated in turns by Frankie--who likes cheese, numbers, the sea when it's pink and "smooth like counting," and being alone when he feels bad--and a cast of characters that includes his worried Gran, his callous teacher, and his not-so-reliable father. Set in the summer of Annichka the Soviet space dog, Here I Am is a mesmerizing story about the lucidity of children and the shortsightedness of adults.

Author Biography

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Scotia Bank Giller prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her historical novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. The Hunter and the Wild Girl, her most recent book, won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. Pauline lives just outside Victoria on Vancouver Island.