Michael Donor’s Grow Where They Fall,  where the protagonist considers buying a Robert Mapplethrope print, the photograph of a nude Black man, but the sitter’s pose- pulling his knees up in front of his face – is troubling, “ Was a weeping or was this a moment of gentle repose? Wonders Kwame. “Was this clutching and supporting of himself the model demonstrating he needed no one else?  

In 2017, Kwame is teaching English at a South London secondary school. His pupils consider him one of the “safe’ ones, and he lives with his university friend Edwin, a generous, willowy, Period Drama – y man” in the flat Edwin’s TV chef father and aristocrat another bought him. The 30-year-old Kwame is schooled in disappointment, and alive to the hostility he might face as a gay Black man- whether racism from white people or homophobia from an older black generation. When he came out after university, his Ghanian parents displayed  revulsion taking about the diminished life Kwame could expect if he continued down that chosen gay path.”

Although their relationship has since been repaired, but Kwame’s parent have started putting pressure on him in different ways: “ Can’t gays adopt?” And pressure from a different kind comes from, electrifying change maker Marcus Felix , who, as Kwame’s new acting headteacher, seems to want to take liberties. Kwame must reckon with himself as he n never has before. Can he face the ghosts of his childhood? How will he learn to move through the world without losing who he is? And where does existing stop and living begin?

 Kwame is both educator and schooled. Christmas plays and “damp-smelling’ cloakrooms. Its 2017 academy equivalent has airy architectural designs and “Data Hub” in place of a library.

Kwame’s charismatic cousin, Yaw, a 22-year-old distant family connection from Ghana, comes to live with Kwame’s family in South London. “ Yaw made everyone glowy-eyed, sugary and slow,” we are told.  “Twinkling spirit” brings 10-year-old Kwame to an awareness of himself, just as it brings out a lyricism in Donor’s prose. It is beautiful strand, rich with playful childhood misunderstandings, whether about song lyrics or adult behaviour. But it also begins the process where Kwame becomes the man we see later reticent, withholding.

Grow Where They Fall by Michael Donor, Fig Tree £16.99, 432 pages.

Decline of ethical standards