Shortlisted for the Costa Children's Book Award 2007.
An extraordinary story of a powerful teenage friendship that crosses all bariers. A lonely boy trying to manage the containing conversion of his boarding school meets Finn living alone in a hut near the shore. How the two build a relationship that is so important to each, despite knowing so little about each other, is wholly captivating. Once again, Meg Rossoff who has already won prizes for How I Live Now and Just In Case seems able to inhabit a teenager's mind.
Costa Book Awards 2007 Judges' comment: "Its central character caught between childhood and adulthood, this poignant and affecting book, tinged with melancholy, is both haunting and elegiac."
I was at boarding school in East Anglia, my third. I didn't want to be there. But if there had been no school, there would be no Finn. He was like the hut, in fact - it took a while for both of them to warm up. But that is all I longed for. Finn, warming to me. Asking me to help on the boat. I didn't want it to end. Now I am waiting for the end.
Meg Rosoff grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and moved to London in 1989. The bestselling author of ten books, she has won or been shortlisted for twenty international awards including the Orange First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the National Book Award and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Her first novel, How I Live Now, has sold over one million copies and was made into a feature film. Meg Rosoff was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2014. She lives in London with her husband, daughter and two lurchers.
