Andrew Smith’s novel Grasshopper Jungle, a wild and totally original adventure about giant killer bugs terrorizing a small US town, is on the longlist for the Carnegie Medal. Here again he puts adolescent boys at the heart of a sophisticated and skilfully structured sci-fi story.
Fifteen-year-old Ariel first escapes death in his country’s civil war by hiding in a refrigerator, later to be saved from the hell of a refugee camp and offered a new life with a family in the US. There he spends a summer with his adopted brother Max at the strangely sinister Camp Merrie-Seymour for boys. A separate strand of the story involves the survivors of an expedition to the Arctic in the 1800s, another describes the nightmare road trip of ‘the melting man’ – a deranged individual who is quite literally falling to pieces. The three stories are linked, everything leads back to the bizarre activities of the research laboratories where Max’s dad works. Extinction, identity, freedom of choice, language, war and brotherhood, they’re all themes in this extraordinary novel. ~Andrea Reece
‘I devoured @marburyjack’s wonderful ‘cool/passionate’ Grasshopper Jungle.’ Sally Green
‘A masterpiece of a book’ Michael Grant
‘Literary and rude, cerebral and hilarious’ The Scotsman
Author
About Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith is English although he was born in New York and lived in California until he was in his early teens. He watched the moon landings on TV in his San Francisco home.
He has written for the Melody Maker, the Face, the Sunday Times, and the Observer where he has written on the KLF, death row, Damien Hirst, Jeff Bezos, Bianca Jagger and much much more. He currently lives with his family in Norfolk.
