Ratcatcher
by Lynne Ramsay

It is the summer of 1973, and 12-year-old James Gillespie lives with this family in a Glasgow project, which is becoming increasingly squalid as a garbagemen's strike wears on

While at play one day, James accidently causes the drowning of his friend Ryan in the local canal--and flees the scene, apparently unseen.

Ratcatcher follows James as he trys to live with his terrible secret and how it effects his life and relationships.

Along the way he strikes up a touching intimacy with an older girl whom the other project boys use for sex, falls in with a street gang, and dreams desperately of leaving the projects and moving to one of the clean, new houses being built a few miles out of town.

But there are no fairytale endings, and ultimately, he is as incapable of escaping his circumstances as he is of escaping his guilt over Ryan's death, rendering Ratcatcher a finely-wrought, unsentimental, and wholly remarkable coming-of-age tale.