The Fail Safe

Jack Heath's The Fail Safe is a teen spy thriller for 11 year olds about a boy who has worked out that his whole life is a lie.

What happens

Fero is fourteen. He has a mum and dad, a green school uniform and a place on the soccer team. Except his "parents" are spies, and now he knows it. He's really Troy Maschenov, a soldier from Besmar, the country everyone around him hates. He was captured, brainwashed and given a new name.

His real memories are coming back in pieces. So he has to keep smiling at breakfast while he plans his escape (and think twice about every cup of tea he's handed).

It's tense in a very particular way. Every conversation is a test. Is the boy on the train being friendly, or watching him? Why did Wilt stay standing when the explosion lit up the sky? You're right inside Fero's head as he weighs up hundreds of tiny choices, any one of which could give him away.

A lot has happened to him before the first page (a mission, a bombing, a bullet scar he can't remember getting). The book fills it in as his memory returns, in short flashbacks to his training as a child soldier.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a proper teen thriller and it sits at the very top of this shelf. In one flashback, twelve-year-old Troy is questioned in a blood-spattered cell, clamped under a guillotine with one blunt blade and one sharp one. The blunt one comes down on his neck again and again. A friend from his army days dies on the television news, killed by a bomb in his own satchel. There's talk of nuclear strikes too, and an instructor who throws a half-drowned boy back into a river.

If your reader is still getting used to scary scenes, this one will be too much. If they're already racing through older thrillers and love working out who's lying to whom, they'll find it very hard to put down.

What to read next

For another story about a young person living under watching eyes and trying never to give themselves away, try The Hunger Games. Katniss learned to keep her face blank and her thoughts to herself long before the day of the reaping.