Something’s chasing David Chase. He’s convinced it’s fate, determined to redress the balance after he barely saved his baby brother from attempting to fly from an open window. As far as this 15-year old is concerned, he’s doomed. Can he escape fate, disaster and catastrophe? David’s certainly going to try. Cue a new name – nothing bad can happen to Justin because he doesn’t exist, or so the theory goes – some killer second-hand clothes, a couple of new friends and an imaginary dog.
Marked man, or paranoid and delusional teenager? When a plane nosedives and crashes into Luton airport, where Justin is hiding out, you begin to wonder. The novel is broken up by fate, ominously commenting on Justin’s attempts to run, and has a great foil in Peter, the genius teen astrophysicist Justin befriends. Agnes is his highly eccentric love interest, an up-and-coming photographer a couple of years older who shows him that sex is a complicated beast indeed. Then there’s his baby brother. Rarely, far too rarely, Justin notices brilliance in the toddler, but doesn’t begin to grasp the profound and complicated thoughts his brother is having.
Following up her multiple-award winning crossover debut novel, ‘How I Live Now’, was always going to be hard. Shortly after its publication, Rosoff was diagnosed with the breast cancer that killed both her mother and sister. It’s not surprising, then, that her second deals with death, cheating fate and ultimately, choosing to live. With a boy as its protagonist, it’s not flowery and dreamlike, like the debut, but is intelligent, ironic and darkly funny, and makes nods to Samuel Beckett and existentialism. Sounds heavy? Really, it’s about what a bloody nightmare growing up can be.
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