1970: Fourteen-year-old Tony becomes seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre rituals. It's a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is explosively risky.

2003: James is a young TV researcher, living with his boyfriend. At a loose end, he begins to research the far right in Britain and its secret gay membership.

The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel unforgettably intersect.

Children of the Sun is a work of great imaginative sympathy and range - a novel of unblinking honesty but also of deep feeling, which illuminates the surprisingly thin line that separates aggression from tenderness and offers us a picture of a Britain that is strange and yet utterly convincing.