Nominated for a Carnegie Medal, shortlisted for the Booktrust Teenage Prize and marketed as a novel ‘written by the winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize’, I was in danger of writing this off as a very ‘worthy’ book. However, as soon as I began reading I was drawn […]
I have been waiting to read this for almost a year since I first read the blurb, and I was certainly vindicated: it is superb. What’s it about? The story unfolds via two narratives set a week apart in which a race against time develops. In the first chapter, new mum Alice Fancourt describes the […]
Billed as a crime thriller, the emphasis needs to be on the ‘thriller’ aspect. Although this is definitely a novel about terrible crimes, the action is more suited to an espionage story and could easily be made into an action movie. In fact, much of the time that’s what I felt like I was reading, […]
From the opening sentences this is a very dramatic novel. ‘I could see him waiting for me outside the steel school gates. ‘Roy.’ What’s it about? Theo Glassman has a bodyguard – though he has no idea why – who he constantly tries to outwit in order to live a ‘normal’ life. Operation “Liberate Theo” […]