Hostage Three

by Nick Lake

Nick Lake follows up his powerful and poetic debut In Darkness with this equally hard-hitting and engrossing - although very different - young adult novel.

Teenage rebel Amy is dealing with a host of problems when her super-rich but remote banker father springs a surprise on her - he’s taking her and her stepmother on a voyage across the world on a luxury yacht. Resenting his attempt to reconnect with her, Amy is unwilling, but the boring family trip she had dreaded takes a truly nightmarish turn when their boat is captured by Somali pirates, and the family suddenly find themselves commodities in a strange and deadly transaction. But the pirates are not everything she might have anticipated, and soon Amy finds herself building a powerful but dangerous bond with one of her captors which could change her life forever.

Grabbing the reader’s attention from the first sentence, this is a bold, ambitious and gripping thriller. Lake’s sparse, taut, perfectly-controlled narrative bubbles with a potent sense of menace throughout, and he is brilliantly insightful in his depiction of Amy, a complex character struggling to work out what matters to her in a situation far outside her realm of experience. This challenging, emotionally-resonant and often surprising young adult novel will stay with readers long after they have closed the book.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Nick Lake

Nick Lake was born in Britain but grew up in Luxembourg, where his father worked for the European Parliament. Nick works in publishing by day and writes in every spare moment he can find. In 2012, his powerful and moving novel In Darkness, about the Haitian earthquake, was published for adults and older teenagers, receiving huge acclaim. Hostage Three is his very different but equally powerful second novel for teenagers. Nick lives near Oxford with his wife and family. His long commute to work gives his imagination time to explore places he's never visited.