AT THE HEART OF James Miller's first novel is the shocking theme of missing children: images of abandoned, abused, ghostly children soak the settings, invading the characters' dreams, their waking visions, filling up the book's streets, its corridors, its schools and barricaded homes.

This imagery has a global width and depth. Miller disturbingly juxtaposes the desperate plight of homeless children in the Middle East with the trapped, closeted, joyless lives of public schoolboys in a warped version of contemporary Britain.

The novel is a mélange of many different genres, blending sci-fi, horror and thrillerish elements. But for all its textual complexity, in essence it is two distinct narratives: a rites-of-passage story about a bullied public schoolboy who disappears; and his father's desperate search for his son and some sort of meaning in our postmodern world.

The father's story kicks off the novel in dramatic fashion. Arthur Dashwood, an oil executive, is kidnapped in Baghdad and traumatised by the experience. Miller's camera-like prose then focuses on Arthur's son, Timothy, who is being bullied at his miserable public school. Finding no real comfort from his distressed father and his neurotic mother, the over-protected Timothy seeks release by playing violent interactive computer games, imagining that he is fighting in the Middle East. His pain is exacerbated when a boy goes missing at his school: he is questioned by the police and subtly blamed by the pupils for the boy's disappearance - until he too goes missing.

Switching to the perspective of the father, we find him listening to tapes of people being interviewed about the disappearance by a private detective, as Miller draws the reader into a nightmarish, surreal world. This is a novel that makes the reader think about what we are doing to boys in this society. A powerful, entertaining and disturbing read.

Lost Boys by James Miller
Little, Brown, £12.99; 288pp
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