Escape from Shangri-La

Michael Morpurgo's Escape from Shangri-La is a family story for 10 year olds about a girl whose long-lost grandad turns up on the doorstep one rainy afternoon.

What happens

Cessie is eleven and should be practising her violin. Instead she's watching an old man with a long straggly ponytail standing in the rain across the road. He's been there all day, staring at her house.

When he finally rings the bell, he says he's her grandad. Her dad's dad. He last saw his son when Arthur was five, waving from the back of a bus, nearly fifty years ago. He knows far too much to be making it up. He even knows who Cessie was named after.

Cessie loves him straight away. He calls himself Popsicle. He sings along to the Beatles, eats chocolate digestives by the plateful and makes brilliant duck noises in the park. Her mum takes him in too.

Her dad is a different story. Arthur grew up in a children's home and has never talked about his father. Now the man is sleeping in their spare room and Arthur can barely bear to be near him. And Popsicle can't (or won't?) remember where he's been living all these years.

That's what makes it so good. It's a mystery about a person. Who is Popsicle really? And why is Cessie's dad so angry? Cessie tells it herself, and she's honest about her own fibbing and her prickly moods, which makes her very easy to like.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Early on, Popsicle collapses at the kitchen table and cracks his head on the corner. There's blood, an ambulance and a long, frightening night at the hospital. We also hear that Arthur's mum drowned in a boating accident when he was ten (that's family history, not something that happens in the story). There's sloe gin and beer, and Cessie listens through the floorboards while her parents row about Popsicle.

If your reader doesn't mind a few tears along the way, there's so much warmth here. An old man and a girl becoming friends over violin tunes and ducks is a lovely thing to read about.

What to read next

For more grandparent stories, Farm Boy is Morpurgo too. A boy spends his holidays on his grandpa's farm in Devon, listening to stories of the old days and of a horse called Joey.