In his 2008 debut, Submarine, Joe Dunthorne managed three cracking portraits of children: the book’s narrator Oliver Tate, a fifteen-year-old uncertain whether to concentrate on improving his stamina in the bedroom or saving his parents’ marriage; Oliver’s acerbic yet fragile girlfriend, Jordana; and Chip, an adolescent so brimming with sexual bravado that even Andy Gray and Richard Keys would probably find him a little outré.

In his new novel Wild Abandon Dunthorne has produced another gem in the form of Albert, a millenarian eleven-year-old with an unhealthy interest in guns and an impeccable phone manner. The second youngest member of his parents’ commune Blaen-y-llyn on the Gower Peninsula, Albert has been convinced by