"Boy", published in 1931, had to be withdrawn four years later when a jury found its publishers guilty of issuing an obscene libel. This even, which modern readers will surely find astonishing, is described in the present edition in a foreword by James Hanley's son Liam and an introduction by Anthony Burgess.

The novel tells of thirteen-year-old Arthur Fearon who, driven by his unhappiness at home, stows away on a merchant ship bound for Alexandria. Hanley himself went to sea as a boy. He wrote Arthur's story from personal observation and in a rage of indignation agains the romanticizing of life at sea. He portrays ignorant men, raised in poverty and trapped in the frustrating narrowness of that life, made helpless against their own brutality; dangerous beings to a highly strung boy. They assault him sexually, exploit him sentimentally, bully him, and finally land him in a situation far beyond his managing. The men "don't mean it", they boy's pathetic courage flickers on to the end -- James Hanley's understanding and compassion embrace all of them except for the representative of authority who brings the affair to its terrible end. And T.E. Lawrence expressed the matter exactly when he wrote Hanley in 1934: "Parts of Boy are very painful: yet I think your sanity and general wholesomeness stick up out of your book a mile high." As Anthony Burgess remarks: "Now readers have the opportunity to be shocked directly, rather than through notoriety. They will undoubtedly be shocked, but the shock will have nothing to do with the titillations of the pornographic." In Richard Aldington's opinion "Boy" is "One of the most genuinely pathetic novels of our time. It should be read, if only to discover what man has made of man." TE had a typescript draft, a Boriswood presentation copy and a Boriswood 1934 edition in his library at Clouds Hill cottage in Dorset along with nine other books by Hanley. Letter Nos. 556 and 581 in David Garnett's "The Letters of T.E. Lawrence" were sent to K.W. Marshall of Boriswood in connection with the case against Boriswood for issuing an obscene libel