The Changeling

Robin Jenkins’s The Changeling follows thirteen-year-old Tom Curdie, a clever boy already written off because he comes from a Glasgow slum. Believing that kindness and better surroundings might change his future, teacher Charlie Forbes takes Tom on a family holiday to the coast.

What affected me most was how ruthlessly Jenkins questions that good deed. Charlie genuinely wants to help, yet never fully understands the humiliation of being carried briefly into a comfortable world before being returned to poverty. Tom is neither an innocent rescued child nor the delinquent others imagine, but an intelligent, watchful boy who sees the class divide far more clearly than the adults around him.

Quiet, compassionate and increasingly devastating, this is a powerful novel about poverty, pride and the damage well-meaning people can cause when they mistake charity for understanding.