the shepherd's hut is told in the voice of the boy, jaxie clacton, and it crackles with the rough innocence innocence that by the end of the story has turned into something quite different. welcome. the two principal characters in this story, who carry it all, are difficult people. they are both to some extent guilt—ridden and damaged. why do you expect a reader to become so involved in them and to follow them on thisjourney? it is a good question. i am not sure i have the answer. my experience of writing the book was finding those characters and following them in almost the same way as the reader does, and discovering what they are about. with a sense of compulsion, really, on your part? yeah. so they... i have one character and follow him until he bumps into another character. and it is... it is just happenstance in the first instance and then, you know, rewriting later on, because just to make these opposites match, one is a 15—year—old, borderline sociopath, a boy, and the other is an older man and they are both lost in their way. so of all the gin joints in all the world, you know, eve