Her dad slowly floats away from his mind, forgetting little things like what day it is or when something happen. Both Sora and her father have been obsessively exploring the zones in secret, each with motives of their own.

Up until then, i was also quite annoyed by Sora because she just came off as a bland, no-personality character (which I thought was a pity since I was SUPPOSED to be able to relate to her quite a bit). An outstanding debut, this is a unique and ambitious story of grief and coming of age, woven around a rich backdrop of Japanese folklore, culture and magical realism.Sora feeling lost in the unknown future, and the bittersweet nature of changing friendships, felt incredibly relatable. There are themes of grief (and all its stages), growth (as both a young person experiencing trauma and grief), and living in liminal spaces where time moves faster, slower, or normally. Candy Gourlay’s Bone Talk was shortlisted for both the Carnegie medal and the Costa children’s book award.

The honour of my first 5-star of the new year goes to Clara Kumagai’s phenomenal debut, that blends magical realism and sci-fi elements into a haunting tale of grief, family, time and the earthquake that shook a nation. I’m glad it had a great narrator (Susan Momoko-Hingley), with a somewhat hyponasal voice but a great voice anyway and a nice accent and intonation. Considering this is a fantasy book containing a lot of science, it’s not surprising that Catfish Rolling is more of a feeling than something that can be explained. View image in fullscreen Simon James Green, author of the ‘timely’ Boy Like Me, photographed at home in south London.The main theme of this novel is, however, grief, and I thought it dealt with this topic beautifully, with the difficulty of losing someone you love playing through this whole book; how you can feel that you've moved on, but then grief rears it's head and you're lost all over again. Since losing her mother to the devastation, Sora has felt aimless and alone and when her grief-stricken father goes missing, she follows him into uncharted spaces and unknown dangers.