After

Morris Gleitzman's After is a Second World War story for 11 year olds, told by a boy who has spent two years living in a hole under a horse.

What happens

Felix is thirteen. It's 1945, he's Jewish, he's in Poland, and he's hidden in a pit beneath a stall in a barn. A man called Gabriek brings him food and water every night and takes away the pee bottles. Gabriek's is the only voice he ever hears.

So when Felix wakes up on his birthday and there are lots of voices above him, he has a fair idea what that means.

He lies in the dark trying to do something with the fear. He tries thinking about the valve system in a hand-operated water pump. He tries pretending to be William out of the Richmal Crompton books, off having adventures in the woods. Neither works.

Then he hears the safety catch come off a gun.

That's the first few pages. It tells you exactly what sort of book this is, and somehow it also tells you how funny it manages to be.

Because Felix is thirteen and takes everything completely at face value. He grumbles that by 1945 you'd think someone would have invented quieter straw. He's worked out a signal with the horse, Dom, for when Dom is standing on his trapdoor. He notes that all his education will be wasted if he dies tonight.

The men upstairs turn out not to be who he assumed. Gabriek lets them take him away so they won't find the boy under the floor. And Felix climbs out of the hole for the first time in two years to go after him.

Right. The proper warning, because this one needs one.

Felix's mum and dad were murdered in a death camp. He says so plainly in the first chapter, as a thing that has already happened rather than something the book is building towards. He's decided that if the Nazis kill him he'll look death in the face, the way he believes they did.

He also knows what gets done to people who shelter Jews, and to slave workers who escape, and he explains both quite matter-of-factly, because he read it in a newspaper.

None of it is there for effect and none of it is softened. This is a book that trusts a child to hold something true.

If your reader is ready for that, it's extraordinary. If they're not, leave it a year. There isn't really a halfway with this one.

What to read next

One more thing. This isn't where Felix begins. His story starts in Once, three years earlier, with a boy in a mountain orphanage who finds a whole carrot in his soup and decides it's a sign.