ACHUKA Book of the Day 11 Aug 2026
Publisher: Fox & Ink Books
ISBN: 9781917894159
“This is an extraordinary piece of writing: startlingly original, philosophical and challenging, but so beautifully and intelligently written that it feels like one of those rare dreams that stays with you and changes you.” Foyles
I so nearly did not list this book. Got close to giving up reading further than the opening pages. And yet, and yet…
First of all you can imagine that for me (Michael Thorn) it was disconcerting to have to read a novel in which the main character is a 14-year-old (for some of the time) girl whose first name is Thorn. I haven’t been addressed as Thorn since being at secondary school.
And then there is the timeline. It is all over the place. That is the point of it as it happens, but it takes some getting used to.
The character, Thorn, is somewhat diffuse. She is so unfixed (sometimes a child, sometimes an adolescent, sometimes an adult) that you end the book feeling that you have never got to know her, which I’m sure cannot be a good thing in a novel.
The allusions to political menace are intriguing rather than helpful to the central dynamic of the book.
And yet, and yet…
I believe it will find readers. And they will be rewarded with a fascinating philosophical riff on time and individual existence. Thorn is a girl who becomes “unstuck in time”. For the entire novel she is having an out-of-body experience, moving backwards and forwards in time.
I’m remembering the future. Remembering things that haven’t happened to me yet. I’m a fourteen-year-old girl, but I’m also twenty, and I guess I’m also that eight-year-old by the swimming pool. I’m all these people and they’re all the same person, and I can remember being all of them, and they’re all me.
And later:
Was she a teenage girl dreaming about her future (which may or may not turn out how she dreamt it), or was she a grown woman dreaming her past, or what she that little girl by the swimming pool, making up stories for all the years ahead?
And later still, when having a chat with a cat about identity and death (as you do):
Think of a book. You’re a book that’s already written. I’m a book that’s already written. But as you read it, word by word, you know what came before, but what comes next is a mystery, a surprise. But you could choose to open the book, if you had thumbs, at any page. You could skip ahead, skip back. Maybe life’s like that, looked at from outside.
This rewarding and refreshingly mind-expanding read is difficult to classify. It is not really a Young Adult book. Milly Chapple’s dreamy illustrations make it accessible to 10+ and I can think of several primary aged children (Y6) who I would have been happy to give it to when I was working amongst that age range. “Here, see what you make of this,” I would have said.
A story of love and imagination, of metaphysics and politics, of empathy and mystery, it’s curious and compelling. Alice in Wonderland meets Kurt Vonnegut in a tale of surreal teenage turmoil.
Shouldn’t she be in her body?
Shouldn’t she be her body?
That was the first clue she had that something had gone sideways.
Thorn wakes up one morning hovering over her own body. Watching herself go about her days from a distance, she bounces around her past, present and future, gradually putting together the pieces of her life. Through love and resistance, Thorn is faced with how she sees herself, and must figure out if the things that mattered before are what are really important.
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Thorn by A.F. Harrold. A surreal tale of teenage turmoil exploring love, imagination, metaphysics, politics, empathy and mystery – Daily new children's book #kidlit #BookOfTheDay #ad https://t.co/GFBCedHXrZ
— School Reading List (@SchoolReading) August 8, 2026
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