The Lament of the Leprechauns
by
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"The kid hadn’t seemed frightened any more.
Wayne had smiled at him.
Now Baz really was confused. His nose was inches from Wayne’s. The kid should have been pleading for his life, like all Baz’s victims did. But he was smiling at him.
That was when it had happened!
That was when the badly injured Wayne Higginbotham had faced down the much larger bully and had somehow knocked him out.
Knocked him out without so much as touching him, well that was what some said anyway. Wayne couldn’t actually remember. The last thing he could remember was seeing Baz stretched out on the ground twitching; then he had heard someone, probably one of Baz’s gang, shout:
“Quick, get his mother”
The next thing he knew, he was lying in a hospital bed.
That hadn’t been the end of Wayne Higginbotham’s very peculiar day, though, oh no. That had only been the start.
It got much weirder after that.
Much, much, weirder."
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About the Book
11 year-old Wayne is a working-class kid, growing up in the Yorkshire Dales with his rather morose father who has a monotonous job in a factory and his mother, who cleans at a local pub. Everything seems fairly normal in his life, except for the fact that he has unfeasibly large, pointed ears. Wayne's mundane life changes dramatically when a local bully puts him in hospital, where he inadvertently discovers that everything he had taken for granted in his life was based on a series of secrets and lies. This book describes how Wayne, upon discovering that he is adopted, runs away to find his real parents. On his travels, Wayne discovers that he is the son of the last survivor of an immortal, magical race who inhabited Ireland in its early prehistory. Wayne's latent magical powers emerge and increase as he takes more and more risks, until he is nearly as powerful as his shape-shifting forebears. His natural father explains his destiny to him as the prophesised saviour, not only for his people, but of wider humanity: "The Slanaitheoir Mor." Wayne Higginbotham's seemingly unremarkable little life suddenly becomes quite remarkable indeed.
About the Author
Allan Howarth grew up as an only child in Yorkshire in the 1960s. To escape from the boredom of only two TV channels, he would read books by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, C.S. Lewis, John Wyndham and Isaac Asimov. Allan later developed a particular interest in historical fiction, reading works by Bernard Cornwell and Stephen Lawhead.