The Boy Who Biked the World: Riding Home Through Asia

The Boy Who Biked the World: Riding Home Through Asia by Alastair Humphreys is an adventure for 9 year olds, and it opens with Tom cycling across Siberia in the middle of winter.

What happens

It opens with Tom flying down a hill in deep snow on a bike whose brakes have given up. He screams. Nobody hears him, because the nearest other person is hundreds of miles away.

He lands face down in a snowdrift and lies there for a minute. Then he wiggles his toes. Then his fingers. Then his nose. He's fine, and he gets up laughing at the Tom-shaped hole he's left behind.

That's the whole book, really. Very hard, and he loves it anyway.

This is the last stretch of Tom's ride around the planet. He's already crossed Europe, Africa and the Americas, and the opening chapters catch your reader up on all of that in a few pages. He sets off again from Magadan in far eastern Russia with Japan, China and eventually England ahead of him.

The practical detail is honestly the best bit. You get the full list of what Tom wears to survive out there, down to three pairs of socks and a big Russian fur hat. He's covered his saddle with reindeer fur to keep his bottom warm.

There are proper facts tucked in as well. The ground in Siberia never fully thaws, so the houses stand on stilts and the water pipes run along the top of the pavement. Families saw blocks of ice out of the river because taps would freeze solid.

And Tom keeps bumping into people. A road crew drive an old army tank because the roads are so bad. A reindeer herder called Kaskil stops his sleigh, lifts Tom's bike aboard and takes him home for pancakes with berries and cream. They don't share one word of language and it doesn't matter at all.

Humphreys talks straight to your reader too. He asks them to look out of the window and work out that the road outside their house joins up with Siberia if you just keep pedalling. Where would they go?

One thing worth knowing is that it doesn't dodge the hard bits of the places Tom rides through. Magadan was built in 1930 by prisoners sent there to chop down trees, and Tom thinks about them as he cycles out of town. There's poverty on the page too, with grandmothers on the pavement selling a few eggs or a jar of jam. It's told plainly and kindly, but it's there.

What to read next

This is the third book, so your reader is joining Tom near the end. It stands up perfectly well on its own. If they'd rather start where he starts, The Boy Who Biked the World: On the Road to Africa is in the library and opens with Tom being handed a bowl of cow's blood and milk in a Maasai village.