The Nowhere Thief

Alice Ross's The Nowhere Thief is a twisty fantasy for 10 year olds about a girl who can slip into other versions of the world and carry things home.

What happens

Elsbeth is twelve and she's been keeping this secret for a while. She feels a shimmer in the air, steps through, and lands in a dark, silent place she calls Nowhere. In front of her, colours swirl like a kaleidoscope. Pick the right mix and you come out in a Somewhere.

Some Somewheres are almost exactly like home. Others really aren't. The book opens with her tiptoeing round a stranger's kitchen where the cat has two tails. A few steps too far and she's standing knee-deep in cold water, with a wave rolling over the rooftops towards her.

Why is she taking things? Because she and Mum run an antiques shop in a sleepy seaside village, and nobody's buying. Mr Lennox the landlord keeps putting the rent up, and he's threatening to throw them out. The strange objects Elsbeth brings back are just what the shop needs. (She tells customers they're Victorian. They're not.)

Then a stern man with a twirly moustache buys three of her "antiques" and asks for more. He also tells her to be careful.

It's a very clever world. Elsbeth's village sits in a country where the capital is Lunden and people pay in crowns, so even her own Somewhere isn't quite ours. Your reader will probably enjoy spotting the little differences.

Elsbeth is really easy to root for. She's shy with customers, knows every scratch on the old sideboard and refuses to wear hairpins. She tells herself she isn't really a thief, and you can feel her not quite believing it. That worry about doing the wrong thing for the right reason runs right under the story.

There are some tense moments to be aware of. In one Somewhere a shopkeeper grabs her arm hard enough to leave marks, and a boy she's never met helps her get away. Her dad died before she was born, which comes up as background.

What to read next

If they're hooked on the idea of other worlds sitting right beside ours, The Many Worlds of Albie Bright is a good next step. Albie's mum has just died, and he uses his parents' science to go looking for her in a parallel universe.