The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day

Christopher Edge's The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day is a brain-twisting mystery for 10 year olds about a girl who wakes up on her birthday to find the whole world gone.

What happens

Maisie is ten today, and she's a genius. She passed GCSE maths when she was six and she's already studying for a university degree from home. What she really wants for her birthday is the kit to build a nuclear reactor in the garage (her parents are a bit nervous about that).

But when she comes downstairs, the house is empty. The doorbell rings. She opens the door and there's nothing there. No street, no sky, no anything. Just blackness.

Then the next chapter flips. Suddenly it's the same birthday morning and everything is normal. Dad's making banana pancakes, Mum's fussing about the card and big sister Lily is in a foul mood.

The book keeps swapping between the two, and working out how they fit together is the whole puzzle. Maisie tackles it like a scientist. She checks whether she's dreaming by pricking her thumb on her birthday badge. Then she repeats the experiment. What exists, and what does it do?

The science comes thick and fast, but it's all in her chatty voice (Vantablack, the Big Bang, and why an ant on a curved gazebo roof would think it was infinite). Your reader doesn't need to know any of it beforehand.

Under the physics there's plenty of heart. Maisie doesn't have any friends her own age. She was moved up into her sister's class at six and got called names, and things have been prickly with Lily ever since. The way the two sisters rub each other up the wrong way feels very true.

The empty-house chapters are properly eerie. At one point the darkness floods into the kitchen and swallows everything while Maisie scrambles for the door. A child who's scared of being left on their own might find that tense, though it's spooky rather than violent.

If you've got a reader who asks big questions about how the universe works, they'll love Maisie.

What to read next

For more of Christopher Edge's clever science stories, try The Many Worlds of Albie Bright. Albie's mum has died, and he decides to use quantum physics to go and find her.