Hostage Three

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.