Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Ground in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in Newford, Surrey, where 13-year-old Stanley Gower meets 16-year-old Charlie Wells, and the threads that bind the boys despite their differences. Stan isn’t a talker; he tends ‘to stay quiet and stare at people’, which, together with his second-hand clothes and his desire to learn, has made him a target at school. Charlie is the opposite, with ‘his cigarettes and talk of girls and his recklessness and messiness’. Yet a friendship blooms on this ‘scrubby grass and tumbling hillside in the south of England’ — on common ground.
We soon discover that Charlie is an outsider too: ‘I’m a Gypsy, a Traveller, yeah. I’m Romany. But it’s kind of… not the most important thing about me.
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