The Extraordinary Colours of Auden Dare

Zillah Bethell's The Extraordinary Colours of Auden Dare is a thoughtful mystery for 11 year olds set in a future Britain where water costs more than petrol.

What happens

Auden has never seen a single colour. Traffic lights, football kits, the grass. It's all the same gooey grey to him. (His mum wears an elastic band on her wrist and snaps it whenever she forgets and calls something green.)

There's a war on over water. It hardly ever rains, his dad's off fighting and a bag of potatoes costs thousands of pounds. So Auden and his mum move out of London to Unicorn Cottage, near Cambridge. It belonged to his Uncle Jonah, a brilliant scientist who has died suddenly.

The cottage is a wreck. Papers everywhere, books torn, a table tipped over. Mum says Jonah was always messy. Auden isn't so sure.

He finds a key in the attic and lets himself into Jonah's old office at Trinity College. It's been turned upside down too. In the fireplace there's a half-burnt sheet of paper that says PROJECT RAINBOW.

Before long he's made a friend called Vivi, and the two of them find something hidden beneath an old shed in Jonah's garden that changes everything.

Auden tells his own story and he's great company. He goes off on tangents about gingerbread houses and whether a bungalow with an upstairs is still a bungalow, then catches himself. Underneath the jokes he's lonely and new, and very worried about his dad.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There's a lot of sadness in the setting. Jonah's death is backstory rather than a spoiler, but Auden starts to wonder whether it really was a heart attack, and armed patrols guard the water in the city streets.

It sits right at the top of this shelf. For a reader who likes a mystery with some real weight, and a hero who sees the world differently (in every sense), it's a very special book.

What to read next

For another Zillah Bethell story set in a future Britain gone wrong, try A Whisper of Horses. London is all mud and moths there, the horses exist only as statues, and a girl called Serendipity can't stop thinking about them.