The Runaways

Ulf Stark's The Runaways is a warm, funny story for 9 year olds about a boy who breaks his grandfather out of hospital.

What happens

Grandpa hates that hospital bed. He shouts at the nurses. He presses the alarm button when he's bored, which is most of the time. He spits out the pills that are supposed to make him calm.

Dad can't face visiting, so the boy goes on his own. Across the city by train, then the red bus, with a pickled herring sandwich and a bottle of beer hidden in his football bag.

Then the two of them make a plan.

It's a good one too. A made-up football camp, a borrowed van, and a baker called Adam who can do a grown-up voice on the telephone. (Adam is really called Ronny. His Adam's apple goes up and down like an egg when he talks.) Grandpa wants to get back to the island house he built, one last time.

The double act is the joy of it. Grandpa swears in every other sentence and the boy fines him a heart pill each time. Stark never actually spells the swearing out, which somehow makes it funnier. They lie to absolutely everybody and feel very clever about it, and the book is fairly pleased with them too.

It's a Swedish story and you can taste that. Cardamom buns, meatballs, a white boat threading out through the islands.

There's one thing worth knowing before you start. This is a book about an old man near the end of his life and it doesn't pretend otherwise. Grandma has died. There's one jar of her lingonberry jam left in the cellar and Grandpa rations it by the teaspoon, because he wants it to last the rest of his life. He burns the suit he wore to her funeral. He asks his grandson whether heaven is real and whether he'd get in.

If your reader has just lost a grandparent, that might be too close. If they've got an old person they love, or they're simply curious about all of it, this is honest and very tender and funny the whole way through.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Escape from Shangri-La is in the library too. Michael Morpurgo's Cessie answers the door to a grandfather nobody in the family has seen for fifty years, and she's the only one who's glad he has turned up.