Endgame – The Calling

James Frey's Endgame The Calling is a fast, brutal thriller for 11 year olds about twelve teenagers who've trained all their lives for a game they hoped would never start.

What happens

Then twelve meteors hit the Earth on the same day. One tears through a football stadium in Istanbul. One lands in the harbour at Naha in Japan. One comes screaming over a graduation in Nebraska while Sarah Alopay is halfway through her speech.

Sarah is top of her class, and in the autumn she's off to Princeton. She's also a Player, raised in secret by one of twelve ancient bloodlines for this exact moment. The meteors are the signal. Each Player is being called, and only one of them can win.

The book hops from Player to Player, a few pages at a time. There's Chiyoko in Okinawa, who can hear but has never spoken. There's Jago in Peru, whose parents run his part of the city. There's Baitsakhan in Mongolia, just thirteen and thrilled to be old enough to play. Some you'll root for. Some you really won't!

It reads like a film trailer, all short sentences and huge moments, and it's properly gripping. The book even opens by telling you it's a puzzle, with clues hidden in its pages (keep an eye out for the odd strings of numbers).

This one sits at the very top of the shelf, and for plenty of readers it'll be beyond it. The violence is on the page and it's graphic. In the opening chapters a stadium full of people burns, Sarah's best friend loses an arm, and her brother is killed right in front of her. One Player tramples a man with his horse and then cuts another man's throat. Several have killed before and are proud of it. There's some swearing, and a drunk passenger on a plane who leers at the women around him.

So it's not for a child who's upset by violence, or one who's only just reached this shelf. For an older, confident reader who wants a dark, globe-trotting chase with a mystery running underneath, it'll be very hard to put down.

What to read next

If they're ready for that, The Hunger Games is in the library too. It opens on the morning of the reaping, in a country that sends its teenagers into a televised fight to the death.