Nicky plays the drums. He plays at church - softly. Friday nights he goes to the youth club there. For the rest of the week he serves his time at school, quietly and anonymously. One Sunday morning he meets Sid. Fresh from an onstage tussle with an elderly music teacher, Sid needs a new drummer for his punk band. Nicky is the chosen one, but he has much to learn. Sid fills his ears with new sounds. Soon Nicky was caught up in Sid's rude schooling. Now part of a whole new scene of misfits and piss-artists, Nicky's past relationships start to fray. A playground attack causes animosity with his old pal Pete; enigmatic girls draw his attention away from Christian crush Ruth; youth leader Mack strains to shepherd him on the narrow path. Profane and often absurd, Sheep and Goats uses short, compressed sketches to recount the thrill and pain of teenage awakenings, the drudgery and slog of education and the frantic need to stand out and fit in all at once: the tale of a naive adolescent, struggling to make space for faith when all that matters is friendship, sex, drink and unholy music.

Lewis Gordon was born in 1983. After completing a music degree he worked as a postman and music instructor before becoming a session musician. He has performed and recorded widely, working with major artists including Codeine Velvet Club, Jon Fratelli and Texas. Since 2011 he has played bass guitar with Deacon Blue. 2011 was also the year he began writing with purpose, inspired by a course in writing fiction at Glasgow University's Centre for Open Studies. There he was introduced to a collective of galvanised writers and became involved with new fiction quarterly thi wurd, where an early short story was published. He was born, raised and lives in the southside of Glasgow. Sheep and Goats is his first novel.