Double Cross

Name: William Joseph
Price range: $

by Malorie Blackman

Interest age: 13+
Reading age: 9+

Published by Corgi Children's, 2009

Classics
Coming-of-age
Love and romance

About this book

This is the very welcome fourth novel in Blackman's award-winning Noughts and Crosses series, which continues the story of Callie Rose, from the ruling elite black class and Tobey, from the minority 'blankers'.

Each teenager harbours a dreadful secret, their reluctant friendship flowering and faltering through shared experience, unwilling criminal involvement and the use of violence to defeat evil.

Blackman portrays an engagingly vulnerable, multifaceted character in Tobey, who narrates the majority of the book, and through him creates for her readers profound moral and ethical dilemmas.

Her dystopian world is sufficiently close to ours for teenage readers to draw many disturbing parallels with contemporary urban culture, but happily resolution is offered through the ultimate indestructibility of true loyalty and love.

About the author

Malorie Blackman is acknowledged as one of today's most imaginative and convincing writers for young readers.

The novels in her Noughts & Crosses sequence have won several awards, including the Children's Book Award, and she has won many other awards for her books for the Random House list. Both Hacker and Thief! won the Young Telegraph/Gimme 5 Award – Malorie is the only author to have won this award twice – while Hacker also won the WH Smith Mind-Boggling Books Award in 1994.

Her work has appeared on screen, with Pig-Heart Boy, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, being adapted into a BAFTA-award-winning TV serial. Malorie has also written a number of titles for younger readers. In 2005, Malorie was honoured with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her distinguished contribution to the world of children's books.

In 2008, she was then honoured with an OBE for her services to Children's Literature. She was the Waterstones Children's Laureate for 2013-2015.