Travelling between France and Spain, a 16-year-old boy is marooned in the Spanish border town of Irun. Snow is falling, darkness is creeping in, and the next train to Madrid is not due until midnight.
The boy is hungry. And he has eight hours to kill.
‘Hauntingly mysterious… right to the end’
Johanna Calmont, World Kit Lit
Donny and Zoe are back. This time they must get out of Calais before they both end up in jail. This isn’t a holiday. This is a role-swapping, day trip to hell. With football.
'Nicola Garrard’s 29 Locks was one of the best YA novels published in 2021. Her new one, 21 Miles, is every bit as good. Garrard deals with hugely important issues, without ever preaching or compromising the pace and excitement of the narrative. This is committed fiction, but the heavy lifting is done by exciting storytelling and compelling characters. It grips, and forces you to think. And to feel. One of the very best pieces of fiction to come out of the refugee crisis.'
Anthony McGowan, Carnegie Medal Winner
It was the middle of the nineteenth century when Lafanu Brown audaciously decided to become an artist. In the wake of the American Civil War, life was especially tough for Black women, but she didn’t let that stop her. The daughter of a Native American woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu had the rare opportunity to study, travel, and follow her dreams, thanks to her indomitable spirit, but not without facing intolerance and violence. Now, in 1887, living in Rome as one of the city’s most established painters, she is ready to tell her fiancé about her difficult life, which began in a poor family forty years earlier.
‘Exciting to see this ambitious novel by one of Italy’s most important writers come out in English… In its reckoning with racism and colonialism, The Colour Line explores the potential for artists to reclaim line and colour in the name of justice.’
Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
After World War Two England was on her knees, so the call went out to the British Empire for volunteers to help rebuild the ‘Mother Country’. Young men and women from different Caribbean islands were quick to respond, paying the considerable sum of Twenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings to board HMT Empire Windrush – the ‘ship of dreams’ that would take them to their new lives.
‘A very important book and legacy for the future’
Baroness Floella Benjamin, DBE