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My thoughts drift. I think about the world beneath us, down,down, down. Water washing stone, grinding it slowly into sand. There are stretches of sea-bed between the islands which used to be valleys with village settlements, thousands of years ago. The sea level has slowly risen, covering it all up. Deep down, a whole flooded life is metamorphosing into something else.

In protagonist, Freya, Julia Green combines the contradiction of binding a palpable zeal for life together with the grief of losing her brother, Joe. The result is that an affinity between the reader and Freya is instantly wrought and it is upon this special relationship that its subtlety and, at times, jagged, raw, emotional truths depend.

Visiting her grandparents on the island where they live and where Joe's tragic accident at sea occurred forces a confrontation with a past that Freya remains deeply affected by. The death of Joe is downplayed meaning that it is Freya's grappling with what this means and how the events came about that take centre stage within the novel.

In spare prose, a sense of community is built up around the island and gradually, through immersion into the ebb and flow of her emotions, Freya is able to reach a level of understanding as to the continuing breadth of feeling she has for her brother, the expectation she retains that he will still be there for her and the yearning that is bestowed upon her because of this.

Julia Green makes a welcome return with this tender, affecting tale.

I snatched the gun from him. It felt cool and smooth to the touch, and the weight and shape of it in my hands was completely alien and therefore completely fascinating.

Mia shares a highly unusual relationship with her brother Jamie, one that is dominated by obsessive fascination. The reasonsfor this appear to be apparent from the outset, their mother suffers depressives phases, the severity of which has increased since the death of her father.

The childhood that Mia and Jamie share in this gritty, urban novel is one that is foregrounded constantly by the state of their mother's mental health. A crisis point is reached when Jamie's tolerance finally wears thin and he resolves to push his mother 'to the edge', forcing her to 'sit up and take notice'.

Having set the familial thrust for the novel, the novel turns into a relentless thriller set amidst a suitably chilling evacuated school building within whose realms lies a gunman. Conscious of her brother's resolve to force his mother's hand, Mia believes her brother to be the gunman. She sets off determined to find him and dissuade him from continuing his scheme.

This is a fast-paced, race of a read with twists and turns that keep you guessing and gulping throughout. It represents a departure from Dhami's writing style and is a highly contemporaneous story exploring bereavement and familial uncertainty. The shock ending certainly comes as a surprise and draws question to the weight of significance our individual backgrounds exert upon our present. It leaves readers with a lasting sense of the desperation and desolation Mia has faced. An accomplished novel.

This is a jaw-droppingly impressive debut novel. It brought to mind two other extraordinarilly good novels - The Collector by John Fowles and Z for Zacchariah by Robert O'Brien - as it will for other readers familiar with those books, and it says much for Lucy Christopher's promise as an author that her first novel can stand proudly side by side with those two titles.

The bare narrative outline: a teenage girl is 'stolen', in other words abducted, from a foreign airport while on holiday with her family, by a young man who, it transpires, has been stalking her for years. He imprisons her in a very remote region of the Australian desert. The girl makes some efforts to run away until it becomes apparent that all attempt at escape is futile.

To begin with the girl despises her captor. In time she comes to have feelings both of admiration and affection for him and it is to Lucy Christopher's credit as an author that she manages to take her readers on this same journey so that by the end of the book we also feel sympathetic towards the abductor despite his crime.

Subtitled 'A letter to my captor', Stolen is an intense first-person voice narrative, which never falters. It has the page-turning propulsion of a thriller and many a time I needed to put the book down to get on with something else, but had to read four or five more pages before it was possible to do so.

If the right lead actors could be found it would make a superb movie. The narrative features a feral camel and there are several 'action' scenes that would make great cinema. Although the author now lives in Wales, it is no surprise to discover that she spent much of her childhood in Australia. The sense of place, of remote desert wilderness, is really well evoked.

I don't have anything else to say about this book, other than, "Buy it, read it, tell someone else about it."

"My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded."
Many a novel has opened brilliantly and promisingly only to disappoint - it would, I suggest, be difficult to gainsay the brilliance and the promise of this particular opening sentence - but not one single moment of disappointment, not one wavering of tone, not one narrative misjudgment awaits the reader in this impressively assured debut novel.
After the grandmother has duly exploded (not spontaneous combustion, as one reviewer misleadingly referred to it, but the result of dousing herself with hairspray and then imperiously insisting on striking the Advent candle match) Pia, the narrator, is ostracised at school. Only one person is prepared to sit next to her, Stefan (Pia's name for him is StinkStefan), a loner who sees this as an opportunity to secure a friendship with someone rejected by the rest.

The novel is set in Bad Munstereifel, a real place, a small spa town in the west of Germany. When a girl goes missing soon after the death by combustion of the grandmother, Pia feels herself the centre of a whispering campaign suggesting that she carries a curse with her.

Pia is not a native German. Her mother is from England. The relationship between Pia's parents becomes increasingly fraught as the novel develops, with the mother continuously making caustic remarks about the small mindedness of the town, and clearly wanting to return to England.

In this climate, Pia and Stefan become close and increasingly daring in their desire to solve the case of the missing children. The tone set by the exploding grandmother - a tone of sardonic relish - is maintained for two thirds of the novel, with Grant's choice of phrasing and use of dialogue exqusitely entertaining, and allowing the reader to take a somewhat detached view of events, as if watching a film. And then, hold on tight, turn those pages with increasing speed, feel yourself there, right there with Pia and Stephan in what proves to be a perilous predicament.

This is truly a book that leaves you gasping with admiration and nervous exhaustion at the end. It is, quite simply, a triumph and Grant is clearly a writer of abundant talent and promise. I feel frustrated that, as of yet, there is nothing else by her to read. But in due course there will be, and I am certain it will be every bit as good as this.

Early on in this superb novel, the main character comes across a half-killed rabbit, with bulging eyes and a crushed spine. She shows her strength of character by doing the humane thing. And the author shows us how good she is at choosing her words and modulating them so that exactly the right tone and atmosphere is achieved.

I hesitated, because it was adorable, but half-shut my eyes and hit it twice on the neck, then once more for luck. I opened my eyes, feeling a complete heel, and saw its hind leg jerk skywards, then sink gracefully back to the ground. When I poked it with the stick its head lolled loose on its fragile neck. There was blood trickling from its ear that was a simply beautiful colour: jewel-red, sparkling so vividly against the tarmac you'd think the rabbit's life had drained out of its eyes onto the road. I touched its unblinking eyeball with the tip of a finger, then snatched it away; it was dead now, all right...

Make no mistake, this is not an easy scene to write well. So easy to overdo. So easy to underdo. So tempting to be either sensationally vivid or evasively poetic.
After reading this passage (page 30 in a 240 page long novel), I knew I could sit back and enjoy a story being told by a writer of the very highest calibre.

Bad Faith is a murder mystery with a dystopian backdrop. The trouble with most dystopian fiction is that it is laid on too thick. The horrors of the envisaged future swamp the drama being played out in its midst. But that is very much not the case here. The personal drama - the predicament of a young couple forced to dispose of a corpse - is always the driving force of the novel. Small details - cars driving past blaring religious trance music - are cleverly dropped in to suggest the daily living atmosphere in a society governed by the One Church and the gangs that intimidate unbelievers.

Cass's own father is a vicar of the One Church who, though sickened by its values, plays the game for the sake of his family's safety. The darker secrets that lurk in the family's past are gradually revealed by Philip with consummate skill.

Thematically and atmospherically Bad Faith recalls the early work of Kevin Brooks, a name I mention with due care, since I am eager to convey how very good I think this novel is; those who know my reviewing will know how highly I rate Brooks' work.

After I had finished it, I looked on Amazon to see if there were any reader reviews. There are (as of March '09) eight reviews, every single one of them 5-star reviews. So I am not alone by any means in thinking this a first-rate, five-achukachick read. I urge you to hunt it down.

I am now looking forward with much excitement to reading Crossing The Line, to be published by Bloomsbury in April (2009).

Well, a full-length young adult novel from the creator of The Gruffalo and other successful picture books! That Donaldson is an expert in the shorter form is now unquestioned, and it is cause for celebration, both for her and for us, that she has decided to launch out in a new genre. The question everyone will want to know is: Can Donaldson 'do' a long narrative? The form is so different from the short rhyming texts of hers we are used to appreciating.

The answer to the question has to be a resounding Yes. Certainly by the end of the novel. I confess I felt a little uncertain during its opening pages, but alternating narrative voices always take a little time to become established. (I was also reading the early part of the novel on a train and there was a distractingly giggly conversation going on in the bay behind me.)

The main character's voice belongs to Leo, a girl who has been living with her aunt and uncle following the death of both her parents in an accident. She is compelled to run away from home, both by a desire to discover her Chinese heritage and by the discomfort she feels in her uncle's presence.

Once she has arrived in Glasgow the torque of the narrative really begins to pull the reader along. The secondary voice is that of Finley, a boy whom Leo befriends in Glasgow and who helps her avoid discovery.

In addition to the two separate narrative points of view, Donaldson extremely cleverly interjects newspaper reports, a shopping list, letters, an email... Coupled with the explicitly documented Glaswegian locations, this gives the book cast-iron credibility, creating a story that is believable, exciting and moving. (There is a touching episode near the end of the book when Finley's family hear all about his role in Leo's affairs.)

Last summer I was sent a very early proof copy of the new novel by Morris Gleitzman, a sequel to Once, a book published at the same time as and - media-attention-wise - unjustly overshadowed by The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas.

I have always had the highest regard for Gleitzman and regard him as one of the very best writers for the young of the past twenty years.

For months that proof copy lay untouched. A second proof copy arrived. I did not read that either. I had, I realised when I finally started reading the book in its final published format, been nervous of encountering ten-year-old Felix again in case any further adventures had a reptrospective lessening of the impact of the first book, read with so much admiration.

Picking up from the end of the previous book, Felix is accompanied by six-year-old Zelda (not his sister) and from the first words, "Then we ran for our lives..." this is the story of how they together attempt to escape being captured by Nazis.

We see many atrocities through child's eyes (the most painful of all at the end of the book) but there is sufficient good fortune and good deed-doing to make this an ever-hopeful edge-of-the-seat read. The character of Genia - a woman who makes her home a safe-house for Felix and Zelda, giving them different names - is strongly drawn and helps ground the central part of a novel which might otherwise, as its title suggests, have been a then-fortunately-then-unfortunately continuum.

Another grounding motif is the figure of Richamal Crompton, described by Carol Ann Duffy in The Ultimate Book Guide as 'the patron saint of childhood'. Certainly, in this book the creator of William acts on more than one occasion as the guardian saint of Felix, helping him to avoid potentially fatal dangers.

Gleitzman's style is always highly accessible, so this book can be highly recommended for any child who is ready to confront the horrors of Nazi tyranny. Thank heavens there is no age-banding on its cover.

Damian Kelleher is well-known on the children's books scene. He was book editor in the glory days of Young Telegraph and T2, frequently chairs children's book events and is seen at all the best publisher parties. For that reason, if I had not genuinely liked this book I would probably have kept my thoughts to myself.

The first thing to be said about it - this is Kelleher's debut as full-length novelist, as far as I'm aware - is that it is extremely fluently written, in an unpretentious, unshowy first-person continuous present. The second thing to say is that the subject matter - a mother of two boys dying of cancer - is not one I exactly relax into.

There is a puff on the back jacket from Jacqueline Wilson in which she uses the phrase "searingly sad at times", so I was braced for a hard read. As it happens, the mother is only a peripheral part of the story. The focus remains throughout on Luke and his brother Jesse, and the uncle who arrives to take care of them.

Conicidentally, as soon as I had finished Life, Interrupted I picked up The Paris Review Interviews vol. 3 and read the interview with Ralph Ellison, in which the interviewers remark at one point, "A common criticism of first novels is that the central incident is either omitted or weak." It's possible that some may feel in this book Kelleher does not give the central incident sufficient weight or emotional cache, relegating it, as the title of the book implies, to an interruption.

It seems to me that that would be to grossly misunderstand what Kelleher is trying to show here. In concentrating on an important schools football final and in optimistically acclimatising to life with their gay uncle, the boys are coming to terms in their own way with what has happened, and doing what boys often do differently from girls when life is interrupted by major events - moving on more quickly and with less overt emotion.

Both the futuristic setting and the cover design led me to expect a different type of young adult novel. The "Coming soon... The Carbon Diaries 2017" facing page 1 gives the clue to the type of book Saci Lloyd has written. I read it on a train travelling to and from the Bacon and Rothko exhibitions and the book was a welcome contrast to the heavily engaging content seen there.
What we have in Carbon Diaries is essentially a family sitcom as reported by one of the daughters. World energy supplies have reached such a pass that each family is given a carbon footprint ration. The authorities respond swiftly whenever the ration is exceeded. Just six months into the situation the father is cracking up. Because 2015 is not all that far away, and because the author is careful not to be too outlandish in her predicted vision of Britain seven years from now, the book is very believable, which makes it at once highly comic and thought-provoking. Most readers, once they've finished laughing, will think, Hang on a minute, is this really the way things are heading? How are we going to cope?