Killing Lizards by William Boyd is the story of 12-year old Gavin, “a thin dark boy with a slightly pinched face and unusually thick eyebrows that made his face seem older that it was.” Deserted by his sister Amanda, who went to a boarding school in England, Gavin yearns for his mother’s interest, but cannot get it.
When bored and with nothing better to do, he liked to hunt for lizards: “Gavin and his friends had been shooting lizards with their catapults for the three weeks of the Easter holidays and had so far accounted for one hundred and forty-three. They killed mainly the male and female of one species that seemed to populate every group of boulders or area of concrete in the country.”
On one such day, while hunting for lizards all by himself, Gavin becomes privy to his own mother’s secret: “Nothing would be the same after this secret. It seemed to him now as if he were carrying a ticking bomb.”
If you want to find out what the secret is and how it will affect the relationship between Gavin and his mother, then all you need to do is read the story by yourself.
William Boyd is a Ghanaian novelist and short story writer. He who was born in 1952.
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