A heartbreaking and gripping story of hope, fear and unbreakable friendship, for readers of Code Name Verity and When the World Was Ours.
England, 1937.
Gwen, Noor, Dodo and Vera are four very different teenage girls, with something in common. Their parents are all abroad, leaving them in their English boarding school, where they soon form an intense friendship. The four friends think that no matter what, they will always have each other. Then the war comes.
The girls find themselves flung to different corners of the war, from the flying planes in the Air Training Auxiliary to going undercover in the French Resistance. Each journey brings danger and uncertainty as each of them wonders if they can make it through - and what will be left of the world. But at the same time, this is what shows them who they really are - and against this impossible backdrop, they find new connections and the possibility of love.
Will the four friends ever see each other again? And when the war is over, who will be left to tell the story?
Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to an Indian father and an English mother. Jamila has written many books with multicultural themes for children and young adults.
Since her first book, The Magic Orange Tree was published in 1979, she has been writing steadily, producing collections of short stories and several teenage novels for the whole age range from six to sixteen, including Grandpa Chatterji, which was short-listed for the Smarties Award and was dramatised for television on Channel 4 Schools, and The Surya Trilogy of which the first, The Wheel of Surya, was runner-up for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award in 1992.
Her book, Coram Boy, a novel for young adults, was published to critical acclaim in 2000 and won the Children’s Whitbread Award, as well as being short listed for the Carnegie Medal.
Jamila has written for television, radio and the stage. Her first original radio play, The God at The Gate was broadcast on Radio 4 and she is currently adapting Coram Boy for Radio 4’s Classic Serial, to be broadcast this December. She adapted her children’s book, The Monkey in the Stars as a play for the Polka Theatre, which was followed up by a Polka commission for a play called Just So, based on Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories. She also dramatised Grandpa Chatterji for Channel 4 Schools that starred Roshan Seth and Saeed Jaffrey.
UK Publisher: Farshore (HarperCollins), July 2022
Editor: Liz Bankes
Primary Agent: Veronique Baxter
Film/TV Agent: Casarotto Ramsay
Extent: 384 pages
Co-agents: Chinese – Bardon Chinese Media; Japanese – Tuttle-Mori
Rights Sold: Italian - Giunti
<aside> 💛 'Coram Boy is a glorious web of changing fortunes and subtle intrigues. There is tragedy and corruption, hope and evil. Sometimes brutal and sometimes unceasingly bleak, the genre of historical fiction has rarely been this good. It's undoubtedly the kind of book that wins awards'. - John McLay
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<aside> 💛 'This is a really original and thought provoking book and I loved it' - The Guardian
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<aside> 💛 'This is the stuff of high melodrama, and readers of the genre who will be swept along by the theatrics will not be disappointed.' - Kirkus Review
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