There are plenty of reasons not to persevere with this coming-of-age novel, but it's worth doing so. Its hero, Billy, a 19-year-old dropout from university who, full of the half-baked dreams of 1968, sees London and the hippy trail to Morocco as his escape from provincial soured ambition, is awkwardly ordinary. Johns gives his narrative the flatly detailed style of a memoir, as Billy hitchhikes up from the West Country, lands a job in a leftwing bookshop and loses his virginity to a rich kid. While his friend gets beaten up in Grosvenor Square and his sister gets busted for dope, Billy is taking notes from the sidelines. "I think I'm looking to books to tell me how to live, who to be," he confides to his girlfriend. This is the point at which you scream for Johns to set him free or at least let him take a big bite of a hash brownie. Instead, he sends him back to Wells and his philandering dad's failing cinema business - but this is where the novel really takes off. Billy's homecoming finally liberates him. The strength of Wakening lies in the fact that its epiphanies are small and therefore utterly believable.