Age 9+

Liam is unusually tall for a 12-year-old, and he has also developed a bit of a beard, so he gets mistaken for a grown-up. This offers unexpected opportunities in a Porsche showroom as well as on his first day at secondary school, when he is assumed to be the new member of staff. And it leads to a strange opportunity in a Chinese desert, where, as a winner of a telephone competition, he becomes the guest of a shady corporation that is planning to make money from commercial space travel. While his parents believe he is on a school trip to the Lake District, Liam is posing as a father, accompanied by a celebrity-obsessed “daughter” who is one of his classmates, and undergoing astronaut training for a rocket trip to the moon. As Liam finds himself in a “Best Dad” contest, voted for by four other children, he copes better with responsibility than the other adults, and all five youngsters learn about what good fatherhood might be. (The author has the benefit of experience of his own seven children.) A crisis in space reveals that computer games may have a use after all, as training for operating a spacecraft. Cottrell Boyce has a gift for suspending disbelief, for laugh-out-loud comedy, especially about the relationship between parents and children and how “grownupness is wasted on grown-ups”, and for constructing a story concisely and compellingly. “Cosmic” is Liam's favourite term of approval. It applies to this book (Macmillan £9.99)

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