Wild Ground

What you need to know before your trail

Neef has always been a storyteller and her story now, working in a café in London, is that her name is Jennifer. Jennifer never knew a boy called Danny, never loved him, never had him wrenched away from her.

As a child, it was always Neef and her mother, Chrissy – troubled, beautiful, at the mercy of addiction and a succession of bad boyfriends. But when Neef becomes a teenager, and the pair move into a flat above a pub with Chrissy’s latest boyfriend, she meets Danny, and he becomes her whole world. Neef and Danny, Danny and Neef. Despite absent parents and small-town bigotry directed at Danny for the colour of his skin, they find solace in each other. They dream of a different life together, convinced that Neef’s stories and Danny’s near-magic touch with plants will get them there. But as they grow older, their relationship is beset by the same forces that hold their families hostage: substance abuse, poverty and racism.