Beatings, humiliation, and those things that go on in Brother Campy’s office……A new term begins at Meadowland’s Grammar School. Sean McCaffery hates Duggin, the industrial town where he is growing up among the working poor, and dreams of escape to university in a city as far away as possible. But that’s four years in the future, and in the meantime he has to endure bullying by seniors at Meadowlands Grammar School, the beatings delivered by the Rodriguan Christian Brothers, and the pain of his passion for the unattainable Paula Yates. When a new headmaster chooses Sean for a task he can’t possibly achieve, Sean is driven into an alliance with Flint, a violent sociopath he’d been avoiding for very good reasons. The consequences are beyond anything he could have imagined.