Age: 10-14

Four-year-old Rosita arrives with her mother in a prison settlement in the middle of a snow-covered wasteland so remote that there is no need for guards. It is a world where there are no wild animals, except for rats and insects, and where teaching science is a punishable offence. Rosita’s mother “does magic”, as her little daughter perceives it: in her secret incubator, which preserves the DNA of six orders of animals, creatures can be grown at high speed. One day, says her mother, she and Rosita will take her precious charges back to civilisation and animals will have a chance again. As it turns out, at 14, the daughter has to make the journey alone. This moving and strange story is convincingly and vividly imagined. It evokes a totalitarian state, with its petty tyrants and spies, in which you can never be sure who to trust, in which secrecy means survival, and betrayal has terrible consequences. Perceptive about greed and jealousy in an environment where everyone has too little, Halam’s novel reminds us that hope and love survive, while the heroine’s tender relationship with creatures and her indomitable mother are the core of the adventure and give it its humanity and power.

(Orion £8.99)

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