Age 9+
On his 12th birthday, in August 1601, Jack Snap is abducted into a magical world. Thereafter he has to save London and his mother, and defeat an evil magus – dealing with spiteful half-people who are split down the middle, an unpredictable dragon, a giant knight and the strange, oracular Mother Midnight. Halfway through this story, characters from Winterson’s bestselling Tanglewreck are reintroduced, including Silver, a 21st-century girl. The tale reaches its peak as the magus turns the city into gold — including everything edible, so people starve and turn on each other — and Jack and Silver fight to reverse the spell. Winterson’s prose is incantatory, using repetition and resonant tautologies (“until it is time it is not time”), and descriptive lists — of boats on the Thames, for instance. This is not a book to dash through. It is one to read slowly or aloud, in order to explore its complexity. The city’s transformation, for example, is a satirical lesson about value (which does not lie in material things); and the “battle of the sun” of the title is a both a literal battle, and a daily fight to be master of oneself.

The Battle of the Sun by Jeanette Winterson
Bloomsbury £10.99

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