Come Up Screaming

England, 1981. Twelve-year-old Sebastian Ranes has been uprooted from his grandmother's house in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and transplanted to a grey coastal town called Felixstowe, where his American stepfather is stationed with the Air Force and the rain comes sideways off the North Sea.

He doesn't know anyone. He doesn't speak the language, not really. And the custody papers he finds in his stepfather's drawer make it clear that his little sister Beanie, still in Altoona, still sleeping with the light on, may not be there much longer either.

What follows is not a story about a boy who learns to fit in. It's a story about a boy who learns to pay attention.

Over three years, Sebby finds his footing in a world that doesn't explain itself. Through the cramped warmth of a flower depot at five in the morning. Through the pages of a love poem collection pressed into his hands by a theatrical French teacher. Through a friendship with a half-Irish Suffolk boy named Taylor who frames everything as film and has opinions about Sting that cannot be argued with.

He finds Mandy, who is from Lanarkshire and has no patience for anything that isn't true. He finds Les, who speaks in the language of work and never explains himself. He finds the florist's where nobody stares at him, and the sea wall where the wind is too loud for awkward silence.

He also finds Brighton, on a night in October 1984, when the ground does something it shouldn't.

Come Up Screaming moves between Altoona summers and English winters, between Radio Caroline crackling through the dark and a cassette of U2 playing at Stonehenge, between a grandmother who sent her best stationery to a man who read her letter and put it in a drawer, and a boy learning slowly, imperfectly, in pencil in the margins, what it costs to belong somewhere and what it means when you do.

This is not the kind of book that explains what it's about. It trusts you to feel it.