The Lifters

Dave Eggers's The Lifters is a strange, big-hearted adventure for 10 year olds about a new boy in a town that's slowly sinking.

What happens

Gran (short for Granite, and yes, his surname is Flowerpetal) moves with his family to Carousel, a hilly little town a thousand miles from the sea. His dad needs work. His mum uses a wheelchair, and his little sister Maisie throws up whenever anyone swings her round.

Carousel is odd. Their house leans one way downstairs and the other way upstairs. His school tilts towards the slope below it. And for weeks, nobody at school says a single word to Gran.

He feels so invisible that he starts to wonder if he's real. So he tries walking through a wall. (He isn't a ghost, it turns out. It really hurts.)

That's how he meets Catalina Catalan. She's small and strong and fierce, she wears the same muddy boots every day and she vanishes into the hills after school. Nobody can follow her. Gran tries.

Before long she's shown him that something is going on underneath Carousel, and that the town might need them both.

It reads a bit like a fable. The narrator steps in now and then to tell you things straight, and there are lovely oddballs everywhere. The best of them is the Duke, a tiny ex-jockey in the school basement who plays Cuban records and eats a sandwich as long as his leg.

It's worth knowing that home isn't easy for Gran. Money is tight, his parents argue at night and his dad has to go hundreds of miles away for work. One morning his mum can't get out of bed. It's all written gently and honestly, but a child going through something similar might want to talk about it.

For a reader who likes their adventures quiet and a little bit magical, this is a real treat.

What to read next

For another kid who escapes into the woods when life gets tricky, try Every Bird a Prince. Eren rides her bike through the Oregon trees to get away from everything, until a frozen little bird flies straight into her.