Mike Amon is your regular teenager. All he wants is to fit in. He wants to sit at the cool bench. He wants to be a star athlete. He wants his first kiss.       

He also wants his mum to survive.         

When his mum is suddenly diagnosed with advanced breast and brain cancer, Mike knows it’s a long shot, but if he manages to achieve his dreams, maybe it’ll give his mum enough strength to beat an incurable disease.       

In the meantime, he has to live with his African dad whom he doesn’t really know, a man who has strange foreign ways – and who Mike doesn’t really feel comfortable sharing his teenage desires and deepest fears. He doesn’t even want to think about what it might mean if his mum never comes home from the hospital.       

Based on his award-winning stand-up show of the same name, and the loss of his own mother when he was 12 years old, Matt Okine’s debut novel, Being Black n Chicken and Chips, is a funny, heart-warming, and sometimes surreal look at how young people deal with grief, the loss of loved ones, and becoming an adult – all whilst desperately trying to fit in with the other kids.