Learning to read her class-mates' work as well as books like The Colour Purple help her to manage her shame. The book's movement towards hope is slow and difficult, never facile, and does not underestimate the obstacles involved. Reading this book made me distinctly uncomfortable, for many different reasons, and it is obviously meant to. Here, in a small class of rape and incest survivors, ex-crack addicts, a girl who has had to watch her mother being murdered and a junior prostitute, Precious begins the long and difficult journey towards recovery. Raped by her father from infancy, she gives birth to his child at 12, on the kitchen floor, following a severe beating from her mother who has also subjected her to sexual and physical assaults. The result is a mongoloid baby whom she refers to throughout the book as Little Mongo.

At 16, Precious is pregnant by her father again and, as the baby starts to show inside her, is expelled from school, and sent to an alternative centre for children with difficulties, called Each One Teach One. It tells the tale of Precious Jones, a 16-year-old black girl who has never been out of Harlem, who has suffered the worst kind of childhood abuses you could imagine. Not exactly Operation Gomorrah or anything.Readable enough in its second half, once the action belatedly starts, the novel nevertheless contains a quantity of snide remarks about book reviewers, invariably a sign that the author is conscious of failure and expects bad notices May Drabble soon return to form.. It's unusual for a book to make me cry, or, for that matter, to make me vomit. Push, a novel by an American writer called Sapphire, produced both reactions.