The Boy the Parish Paid For

About this book

Barbados, 1937. Ten years ago, at a village school prize-giving at the windy northern tip of the island, seven-year-old Ezra Holder recited a long canticle without a stumble, and the rector declared him marked by God for the Barbados Scholarship, the one prize that sends a single young man a year to Oxford or Cambridge. Since that day the fishermen and washerwomen of Pie Corner have dropped their pennies into a biscuit tin with SCHOLAR painted on the side. Now Ezra has won. But his sister Ivy, a maid in the house of the master who coached him, has a memory she has never shared, and the boy who came second has read something he was never meant to see. As the island boils toward the riots of 1937, a ship waits in Carlisle Bay. Will the boy the parish paid for climb aboard?