Age 9+

Hardinge is one of the most interesting children’s authors writing today. Her first book, Fly by Night, a constantly surprising imaginative feat set in an alternative 18th century, deservedly won the Branford Boase Award for a first children’s novel. This, her second, demonstrates the range of her ability. Three schoolchildren, two of them outsiders at school, the third wilder and cooler, take coins from a wishing well, which give them disturbing powers and obligations. This adventurous tale of hidden secrets, unhappy families and deep desires is often creepy and tense, although it also has humour, and the characterisation is subtle.

What makes this book really remarkable, however, is the word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, writerly care in finding the mot juste, the perfect metaphor, striking image, or resonant nuance. A woman looks at a child “absently as if to see whether she had been delivered the right package”; the feeling of being watched is like “dead leaves down the back of your jumper”; supermarket trolleys have “far too much body language for objects with no heads or limbs”. Genius.

(Macmillan £10.99)

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