Age 14+

Rosoff’s previous young adult novel How I Live Now was received with exceptional enthusiasm and awards. Just In Case, apparently informed by the author’s experience of serious illness, is again extraordinary and original. It concerns David/Justin, a 15-year-old boy who is possessed by a sense of doom and plays catch-me-if-you-can with fate, trying to shake his pursuer by unexpected changes of direction including a new name and image. He leaves home. He takes up running. He gives up running. He loses himself in his lust for an older girl, an eccentric photographer who uses his haunted, handsome face to further her reputation, and casually relieves him of his virginity. In his self-obsession he is more than once the indifferent catalyst of other fatalities. Meanwhile, the novel’s realities are uncertain: Justin’s beloved baby brother reasons sophisticatedly while uttering only toddler phrases, and Justin has an imaginary dog that sometimes seems to exist to other people. Like fate itself, which joins in the dialogue, this disturbing, blackly comic, sophisticated meditation on death, madness and sexuality is powerful and tenaciously haunting.

JUST IN CASE by Meg Rosoff
(Penguin £10.99)

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