Porky

In the shadow of Heathrow airport, a girl grows up in a family of four with her unaffectionate, absent mother, her precocious younger brother, and her father. Once a traveling fairground worker, her father's been forced to settle down. Now he sits at home, dreaming up schemes to make money, drinking with his friends, raising pigs . . .

It's those pigs that give Heather her nickname. The mean girls at school call her "Porky," as much as for her animals as for her weight and pink complexion. They don't live in a decrepit bungalow like she does, surrounded by airport traffic and muck. And they don't have a father like she does, one who steals her innocence and makes her grow up too fast.

This is Heather's story. It's easier for her to tell a stranger reading a book than her best friend, a counselor, the man who now loves her. Maybe you will understand her attempts to work, to live, to survive, to fly away as far as possible--as if her wings weren't already clipped . . .

"Deborah Moggach conveys with chilling skill the process by which a fundamentally bright, decent child becomes infested by corruption." --The Spectator

"At once eerily exuberant and bleak, this is a compassionate, tough book." --The Observer

"[An] extraordinarily skilful account of a childhood blasted by what is now acknowledged to be a more widespread offence than was previously recognised: incest." --London Review of Books

"Sustain[s] a first-person register so level in its tone of quiet desperation, so careful to avoid blatant shock, as to hold back the tidal wave of revulsion and pity which threatens, but never quite engulfs the reader." --The Times (London)