Rhidian Brook’s debut novel The Testimony of Taliesin Jones, is a coming-of-age story about a lad searching for answers in a world of uncertainty.

Eleven-year-old Taliesin (aka “Tal”) Jones has known only peace and stability in his life. Until just his birthday his mother ups and leaves home to live with Toni, her hairdresser.

At first, Taliesin, his older brother Jonathan and his dad behave as if she’s just popped out to the shops and she’ll back soon. But attitudes change as the days roll by without any sign of Mrs J,

Farmer Jones starts talking and arguing with himself, periodically shaking his head in bewilderment. Jonathan retreats into sullenness, spending hours lounging in the armchair watching TV and out on his motorbike. Taliesin, already a quiet and introspective boy, makes his escape into the worlds of adventure he discovers in books.

With everything that was safe and predictable in Taliesin’s life now gone, he has to find a different way to make sense of the world. He’s a sensitive lad uncertain about who he is and how he should feel about the things he encounters. He was happy when he was seven but now everything seems complicated:

At night the questions come: why am I here and not there? Why am I me and not them? Before I was me, where was I?

There’s one matter that looms large in his mind, prompted by a question posed by his new RE teacher — is there a God?

Try as he might, he cannot find an answer until he witnesses Billy, his piano teacher who is also a faith healer, straighten the back of a bent old woman.  An idea takes root: miracles are possible.

Armed with his new-found wisdom, Tai forms a gang called the Believers, to demonstrate the healing power of prayer and the laying on of hands. When their first effort backfires, Taliesin is forced to “testify” about his beliefs in front of the whole class.

What makes Brook’s writing so captivating is how astutely he conveys the child’s point of view: all those burning questions and uncertainties and the wonderment when you discover something completely new.

Taliesin wasn’t entirely happy with the role reversal that school imposed. It didn’t seem fair that Grown-Ups, who theoretically had answers in the truck load, were now asking him for answers. He needed to ask more questions still, not because he wanted to distract, avoid or gain attention but simply because there were so many questions to e asked — thousands of them in fact, all queuing up, knocking on the door of his mind, demanding answers.

Tal’s perspective — earnest, confused, sometimes surprisingly wise — makes him a fascinating character but what endeared me most was his love of reading. He’s a copious reader “burying himself in stories, burrowing deep into their other worlds and losing himself there.”

When the novel opens he’s pouring over The Atlas of the World— a birthday gift from his mum — hoping to detect traces of her perfume. Later we find him absorbed in Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies and then Brighton Rock —the latter requiring lots of re-reading because of its tricky words and complex sentences.

He’s a discerning reader having moved on from the illustrated hard cover books of his childhood. Books with drawings, large type he now feels are patronising — instead he gravitates to the books found on his dad’s shelves, books full of words like gullible, immature and juvenile.

Like all true book lovers everywhere, he’s even considering how best to organise his book collection.

He planned to arrange them in alphabetical order, in order of publisher, size, spine colour, title or how enjoyable they were. There were a thousand different combinations he’d thought of. He’s hoarded everything, even his very first readers given to him at a time when it was easier to draw in books than to read them.

Does that sound familiar????