The Crab Line Summer

About this book

Eleven-year-old Dez Pike has one plan for the summer before secondary school: be nobody. After freezing mid-solo at his leavers' assembly, a video of his face is on every phone in his year, so his mum sends him to his grandmother in Cromer. Nell Pike is seventy-four, swears like a deckhand and runs a crab-sandwich hatch by the pier, and she puts him straight to work. Then loud, fearless Ama Osei adopts him, and brings her grandfather to the hatch. Nell takes one look at the old pianist and slams the shutter. Soon Dez is carrying crab sandwiches and messages on a borrowed bicycle between two proud old people who knew each other fifty-six summers ago. He wants nothing to do with it. But the end of the pier is where the trouble started, and it may be where he has to stop hiding.