BEING by Kevin Brooks

Age 12+

When fostered 16-year-old Robert goes into hospital with a suspected ulcer, the doctors find something unusual inside him — something that makes him doubt whether he is human. He wakes up to find sinister strangers in the operating theatre, and so begins a chase that we follow from Robert’s point of view, in which we share his perplexity, his pain and his fear. He finds a way to lose himself in the criminal underworld that was always at the edge of his life as a looked-after child, and there he finds passion and purpose in the company of an unlikely older girl, herself an outsider, as they escape to Spain. Scalpels are put to hair-raising use in this story, while Brooks’s writing is comparably sharp and precise.

Although this novel reads like a thriller, with action and surprises, it is a meditation on the nature of humanity: it asks what it means to be yourself. The end, frustratingly, does not offer answers to all the questions posed by the plot, but it does suggest that to feel, and to love, is enough.

(Puffin £9.99)

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist