He grows up left to his own devices by pretty much the entire town, until a kind old man teaches him to read.

The representation of charming travelling circus manager, Jim Coyne, draws sneakily from Fagan, the supposed protector of Oliver Twist. It also took me a little while to get used to the fact that the author doesn’t use quotation marks in conversations and the chapters are very very short (which is why there are 90+ chapters).His debut novel My Name is Yip has been shortlisted for the Betty Trask, the Wilbur Smith, a South Bank Sky Arts Awards, and the Society of Authors' First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. It’s also a rollicking, page-turning wild west adventure, populated by a cast of arresting grotesques, with luminous imagery and an unforgettable protagonist. I am looking forward to Paddy Crewe's second novel which, one suspects, will be a sequel, filling in the details of Yip's adventures, marriage and later life.

Thank you to the publishers for this review copy, now it is a western - so it's not really my go to read, but this is very well written debut. Some in our book club couldn't get past the writing style, the use of ampersands and the capitalisation of words.

Occasionally during the memoir, he refers to his present life to remind us that he did get through it. Yip is forced to appear in a cage, into which punters pour drink and abuse, only to be rescued once again by Dud. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Abandoned at birth by his father and raised by a seemingly distant mother, Yip is left to his own devices and assumed by most to be dumb as well as mute. I’m a huge lover of historical fiction and the Midwest has to be one of my fave time periods so I enjoyed being thrown back into it.