Five Boys

Description

Things have never been the same in the village since the evacuee arrived and the Five Boys mistook him for a Nazi spy. There have been a host of visitors: the Americans preparing for D-Day, a deserter hiding out in the woods. But it is the arrival of the Bee King who makes the biggest impression. He is a law unto himself, has his own strange rituals and the villagers fear he is beginning to exert the same charm over their boys as he does over his bees . . .

Mick Jackson was born in Great Harwood, Lancashire in 1960. He studied Drama at Dartington College of Arts in Devon between 1979-83. He was a singer in a band for seven years, namely with The Screaming Abdabs and The Dinner Ladies, and made a handful of records.He left London and worked part-time as a care assistant with special needs students in Cambridge whilst writing his first short stories, and got onto the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia in 1991. He returned to Cambridge in September 1992 where he started work on what became The Underground Man. The Underground Man was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Royal Society of Authors First Novel Award.He has written and directed three short films, including 'Pieces of the Moon', which won prizes at various international film festivals and opened the New York Film Festival with Mike Leigh's 'Secrets and Lies'. He also directed a