Pimplewart

Names are not mere labels, but small prophecies. Unfortunately, some are carved with a chisel the size of a lamppost.

Heliosvart Pampleverte Plunkenstorm has decided to keep his name.

It took him a while.

Pimplewart is the story of a boy who doesn't quite fit — not in his family, not at his Highland castle, not at the Scottish boarding school where the Psychoswarm in his head argues constantly about what to do next. It is also the story of a key found in a graveyard, a will stolen from a library, a groundsman who knows what the school was built on, and a raven who has been waiting nearly two hundred years for exactly the right moment.

Set against the backdrop of 1960s Scotland and England, and grounded in the history of the slave trade and its long reach into the present, Pimplewart is a novel about what a person is made of: the voices they carry, the inheritances they didn't choose, and the slow, contradictory, occasionally hilarious process of becoming themselves.

It is also, at its heart, a book about a mind like Yoyo's: one that doesn't plan, doesn't strategise, and has things happen to it rather than deciding them. Long before ADHD had a name, children like Yoyo simply had to survive being who they were, in a world with no language for it beyond "lazy," "stupid," or "trouble." This book exists because I wanted to take a mind like that seriously, instead of treating it as something to be fixed.

For readers aged ten-and-a-half and up. And for the adults who have forgotten what it feels like to be ten-and-a-half.