A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is
a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he
learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a
famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through
it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy
grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's
celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with
praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus
conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach
that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and
droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red
bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes
in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a
human transformation.