Someone once said that all men are created equal. That someone never wandered the streets of São Paulo at night, and they sure as hell never met Leighton and his friends.
Based on interviews with educators, psychologists and the kids themselves, Tup tells the tragicomic tale of Leighton, a dysfunctional twelve-year-old from a dysfunctional family doing whatever it takes to survive on the margins of a dysfunctional society that just doesn't care.
After a failed reintegration with his family, we follow Leighton and an ever-changing band of eccentric characters as they hustle their way from one day to the next on the grimy streets of the largest city in Brazil. Street-life starts out as fun, but as he loses friend after friend to drugs and violence, Leighton's adventure spirals into a glue and crack inspired nosedive.
Tup is a story of kids left to their own devices. Of bad luck and abandonment. Of friendship, love and loyalty and a generation fucked up and over by the grown-ups supposed to look after them.
Leighton and his friends do their best. It's just never good enough. They're slaves to the present, unable - or unwilling - to look beyond the now and consider the future that's coming their way.

Born in Birmingham, UK, to a teacher and a salesman, I studied Electronics and Computer Science before leaving for Austria, Congo and Nigeria to work in the oil industry. Some years later, armed with an MBA and several languages, I changed direction to take a job as an international development manager for a plastic company in Spain, Hungary, Argentina and Brazil, where the company went bust and I ended up stranded.
But it was by choice, and I'm still here eighteen years later, with a wife and child!
I tried my hand at running a gym, phone sales, the stock market and voluntary work, and even became a trainer in Neurolinguistic Programming. But I couldn't shake a nagging desire to write.
So I did.
I wrote and traditionally published three books in Portuguese (Ferramentas Mentais para Traders, Jeito Brasileiro and Soltando o Magro) before discovering self-publishing and writing two novels, Second Coming (historical/adventure fiction) and Tup (fiction, but based on real life and experience in Brazil).
My young son seems to be following in my footsteps. He's already written and illustrated two short stories and distributed them to his school friends with, arguably, more success and a larger readership than his father!