High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Of a Boy (What The Birds See in the UK and US) is a 2002 novel by Sonya Hartnett about a lonely and troubled youth. The omnipresent narrator follows the plight of Adrian, a 9 year old child, who was taken away from his mother as she was "unfit to care for him". Adrian spends his days thinking of things that unsettle him such as sea monsters and growing purple hair. One of the things that most disturbs him is the fact that three children, surnamed Metford, disappear from a neighborhood near his around the beginning of the book.