The long-awaited book by the award-winning writer Winston Smith.
As a youth worker in Britain’s care homes and supported housing projects, Smith deals with some of the country's most deprived and difficult youngsters and hopes that he can make a difference to their lives.
Given his own background (he suffered from drug addiction and near-alcoholism in his teenage years and early 20s) it ought to be a match made in heaven.
But then reality intrudes.
Generation F is the first book to reveal the unvarnished truth about life in Britain's care homes and supported housing projects.
Winston Smith spends his working day wrestling with the problems of damaged youngsters, violent thugs and teenage criminals. He is confronted at every turn by irresponsible parents, incompetent police officers and pointless, expensive bureaucracy.
His writing is controversial, angry and edgy - and it made him the runaway winner of the 2010 Orwell Prize.
‘A devastating book exposing the truth about the anarchy in this country’s care homes’
The Daily Mail
‘Incisive and caustic’
The Guardian
'We could have agonised for hours and then passed Winston Smith over as too difficult, too dark, too much of a risk but we were charged with judging the best. …What carried the day was his passion and conviction that we should know what wrongs had been done in our names in some of those places where most of us choose not to look.’
Orwell Prize Judges