The Tale of Truthwater Lake

Emma Carroll's The Tale of Truthwater Lake is a time-slip story for 10 year olds about a girl who's scared of deep water and swims down into a drowned village anyway.

What happens

It's the summer of 2032 and Britain is baking. When the temperature passes forty-two degrees, the law says everyone has to stay indoors. Polly is twelve and a bit of a worrier (her mum can spot a catastrophe coming a mile off, so it runs in the family).

One night she follows her big brother Joel into the sea. She panics, Joel has to drag her back to the beach, and someone on the old pier films the whole thing. By morning it's all over the internet.

So when they're packed off to stay with Aunt Jessie, Polly can't wait. Jessie built her own eco-house above a reservoir everyone calls Truthwater Lake. Except the lake has almost gone. The drought has uncovered the stone walls of Syndercombe, the village that was drowned to make it.

Polly can't sleep. At two in the morning she swims out and feels a church roof under her feet. Then the water pulls her down, and she's somebody else.

She's Nellie, in the winter of 1952. Nellie's mam died a year ago, and she lives with the Blackwells beside an orchard of huts where people with tuberculosis are sent to get well. Her new best friend Lena is getting better from it too. Nellie's a brilliant swimmer who dreams of the English Channel, and a champion from America has come to pick one child to try it.

The two voices are really different to read. Polly talks straight to you, in the here and now, full of worries about her mum and her brother. Nellie's chapters feel older and more hopeful, with Lena's silly games and a lido full of shivering kids in February. How are these two girls connected? Your reader will be desperate to find out.

The heatwave future is quite vivid. There are curfews, a bread shortage and a mum who's suddenly being sick with no explanation yet. The clip of Polly struggling in the sea gets likes and comments too. For a child who already frets about the climate, that's worth talking through.

If you've got a reader who likes history and a mystery at the same time, this one does both beautifully.

What to read next

If they love a story where the past turns up in the present, try In Darkling Wood. Alice is sent to her grandmother's cottage among the trees while her little brother waits for a new heart, and a letter from 1918 is part of her story too.