Barry Klemm

The Tenth Hero PB Barry Klemm

Fourteen year old Lee Parsons escapes from an English Boarding School in Kent, steals a pushbike and rides down to Dover, and from there decides to keep right on going, all the way home to Australia. It isn't really England nor the school that he is fleeing but his brutal, selfish father Trevor who these days is a very successful television interviewer. In Australia, his best friend, Scott Hagen, with whom Lee once shared great adventures, is waiting. Unlike Lee, Scott has only his vivid imagination with which to combat the austerity of the bland Melbourne outer suburb in which they were raised. Viewing the world entirely in terms of movies and television, Lee and Scott seemed inseparable until Trevor's pernicious habit of beating Lee's mother Fable - a drunken consequence of his then failing Australian media career - finally forced a divorce and custody battle that the foolish and hapless Fable managed stupidly to lose. Since then Trevor's career has blossomed in England, while Fable has been on the downward spiral, culminating in a suicide attempt which might have succeeded had it not been for Scott's audacious intervention. It is a letter from Scott relating this incident that propels Lee on his desperate journey, to ride halfway across the world with no money and no passport, relentlessly crossing three continents of human insanity. Yet for all the madness, there are also good people, willing to make commitments to help him along the way. Many strange and wonderful characters are met and amazing adventures shared, but always somewhere back there is the coldly manipulative Trevor, who knows how to turn something like this into a major media event and exploit himself to great effect as the distraught misunderstood father searching for his lost son. As Lee fights his way onward and steadily turns his mad dream into reality, Scott also fights battles on two fronts: trying to keep the fretting Fable intact until Lee can arrive, and striving to keep the media and au