Stormy skies that bring life — and death
STRANGE STAR by Emma Carroll (Faber £6.99)
IT’S 1816 and as a comet tears through the skies, poet Percy Shelley, his young wife Mary and her stepsister meet in Lord Byron’s villa at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, to tell scary ghost stories ‘to freeze the blood’.
Late at night their young servant boy answers the door to a desperate, scarred and almost blind young girl who has travelled from England to give a true account of scientific experiments, kidnap and electrical storms that is more frightening than anything the others can dream up . . .
This darkly atmospheric gothic thriller takes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as its inspiration and uses the backdrop of the freakish climate conditions caused by the infamous Tambora volcanic eruption to evoke a period when suspicion and folklore clashed with an increasing interest in science to create a superb, disturbing novel. Age 10+
THE OTHER ALICE by Michelle Harrison (Simon & Schuster)
IMAGINE all the unfinished novels and stories lying in drawers and on desks — and the characters within them whose destinies remain unknown.
Such is the premise of this intriguing novel in which Alice, a brilliant and driven teenage writer, disappears at the same time as a collection of mysterious, menacing people — and a talking cat — appears near her home.
Her younger brother, Midge, discovers her secret book, The Museum Of Unfinished Stories, which holds the clue to where Alice is and he attempts to find her with the help of some of his sister’s literary creations — before her fictional villains can beat them to it.
This is an exciting, original and gripping adventure, embroidered with riddles and curses, laced with dry wit, and which gallops along at a terrific pace. Age 10+
EDEN SUMMER by Liz Flanagan (David Fickling £10.99)
IT STARTS out as a normal day but when isolated, Goth-like Jess gets to school she discovers that her best (and only) friend, beautiful, popular Eden has gone missing.
No one knows Eden as well as Jess does, she thinks, so she must trace where Eden might have gone.
But to do that, she is forced to re-examine the last summer they’ve spent together and, in doing so, to confront deeply buried emotional truths about the different, but shocking, traumas they have both been unable to talk about honestly.
Set against a rural Yorkshire backdrop, the ruggedness of the landscape reflects the turbulence of Jess’s gradual unpeeling of how grief, fear, secrets and silence can do lasting damage and how friendship, love and trust can start to heal the wounds.
It’s a strong debut from Flanagan, both authentic and moving in its adolescent confusion. Age 13+