Nevertell

Katherine Orton's Nevertell is a snowbound escape story for 10 year olds about a girl who has never set foot outside the Siberian prison camp where she was born.

What happens

Lina is eleven, nearly twelve. She works in the commandant's greenhouse, where things seem to grow a little faster when she touches them. Her mum Katya works in the camp hospital and plays a mean game of poker (even the guards lose to her).

Then three prisoners drag Lina behind a snowbank. They're planning to cross the wire, and they want her to steal the commandant's vegetables to feed them on the way. She's terrified of them. Vadim is sixteen and already has criminal tattoos. Alexei is known as the Butcher. Old Gleb believes in spirits and ghost hounds.

But beyond the wire is Moscow, and somewhere in Moscow is the grandmother Lina has only ever heard stories about.

The hardest part comes at the last minute. Her mum isn't coming with her, not yet. She's going to keep the guards busy with a card game and follow later, if she can. Lina has to walk out into a snowstorm without her, with a strange warm stone round her neck that seems to know when danger is close.

It's tense from the first page. You can almost feel the cold. There's warmth too, mostly from Lina's best friend Bogdan, or Bogey (he picked the name himself because it could mean a friendly plane, a missile or a bit of snot).

The camp is a brutal place and the book doesn't pretend otherwise. People are starving, prisoners die in the hospital, a guard could shoot you just because he felt like it, and there's a grim hint about what the guard dogs eat. It's rooted in real history, and Stalin is named.

For a reader who worries a lot about being separated from a parent, that goodbye in the dark is going to hit hard. For one who loves a survival story with a bit of magic creeping in round the edges, it's gripping stuff.

What to read next

If they want another trek through snow and old stories, try The Way Past Winter, where a winter that arrived five years ago has never left, and four children live in a house in the forest.