Half-Muffled

About this book

London, 2024. Jude Amankwah is seventeen, from a Bermondsey estate, and in his final year at Candlewick School on a bursary named after the uncle he never met: Tobias Mensah, who fell from the school's bell tower at the turn of the millennium. Jude plans to keep his head down. Then the ringing master hears him keeping time on a desk and asks him to ring the heaviest bell, his uncle's bell, in the twenty-fifth-anniversary peal. He refuses three times and climbs the tower anyway. Up there he finds a rich, brilliant society that seems to want him, a painted board that says his uncle rang 5,040 changes that night and finished at 11:51, and a mother who flinches at the time. Alternating with 1999, the year the girl who will teach him to ring waited on the bench, Half-Muffled asks what you would lie to keep your seat.