A bright, funny, painful and refreshing novel about wanting the very best from life, even when life shows you how very bad it can be. Francis is a fifteen-year-old poet manque and possible intellectual, and as far as he is concerned, his subtle genius is wasted on his family and pretty much everyone else in his hometown of Tyne-and-Wear. His mum has run off her feet ; his dad has just run off; his older brother Chris moved out ages ago ; and he is not sure he even likes his best friend Jacob. So Francis stumbles over the obstacle course of adolescence alone. Then he is diagnosed with leukemia. And it just might be the making of him. Funny, poignant and unerringly genuine, this is a warm and exuberant story of an awkward adolescent boy trying to navigate his family, his future, his feelings and his human frailty.