Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

I read this book because it was short-listed for the Man Booker prize, and I liked it much more than the winner.
The book features a young protagonist, Harri Opoku, an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant caught up in gang warfare on a south London estate. It is through his voice that the story is told--and it is not a happy one.
The novel's world is urban grime and casual violence. Pigeon English opens as Harri has just moved to the Dell Farm estate with his mother and older sister, Lydia, leaving his father, grandmother and baby sister, Agnes, behind in Ghana. Along with the shock of emigration and the usual preoccupations of growing up – whether lovely blonde Poppy Morgan will sit next to him in art class, whether his Diadora trainers can outrun his classmates' Nike Air Max – he must negotiate tougher problems.
Harri's surroundings are overflowing with half-understood menace, most obviously from the alcoholics, dealers, petty criminals and teenage members of the Dell Farm Crew gang who shadow the estate. But gradually his sister, aunt and even his mother, forced into moral compromise in her struggle to give her children a better life, are implicated in the violence that pervades estate life.
Pigeon English opens with a fictional rendition of te actual killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor on a Peckham estate in 2000, and the book weaves this suffering into a murder-mystery of sorts. After the seemingly random stabbing of an older boy outside a fried chicken shop, Harri and his friend Dean turn amateur detectives, scrutinizing the estate and its dysfunctional inhabitants for clues. It is through this proces sthat we get to know the various players in Harri's life--most of whom are unsavory and inescapable. It is a sobering book, well written and hopeful despite all.