Age 11-15

This thriller echoes Kevin Brooks’s Lucas, David Almond’s Skellig and Clay, and Tim Bowler’s own Carnegie- medal-winning River Boy, in that it concerns a mysterious character whose possibly angelic or demonic nature is never quite explained. It has a gripping opening chapter in which a teenage girl, alone at home one night, receives a telephone call from an unknown boy who claims he has called her randomly, has taken an overdose, and wishes to talk to someone as he dies. But he has disturbing insights into the girl’s thoughts and her past. Thereafter, the heroine, who is wilful and unsettled after family tragedies, takes dangerous risks in the snowy landscapes around her home in pursuit of her strange caller — despite allegations against him of abduction and rape.

The theme of the book is how people fear difference, and if the plot is not always entirely logical, it is because Bowler pursues philosophical truths that go beyond logic. What absolutely drives this novel forward, though, is its gasp-inducing chapter ends, and its capacity to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

(OUP £12.99)

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