Small Eternities: 2 (The Aldous Lexicon)

What if someone else was living your life?

You are sixteen. You live with your father in a big Victorian house on the outskirts of London. Your mother is dead, killed in a train crash two years ago. It is snowing. The snow is falling on the house and the wide yard and the gnarled old tree that everyone calls the Family Tree. It makes you restless. You reach out your hands toward an object you've known all your life, and suddenly the walls melt away. When you open your eyes, you are still in your living room. "Who are you?" asks a girl who looks just like you but is not you. "And what are you doing in my house?"

You have stumbled into another version of your life. This girl is sixteen. She lives wth your father (her father) in a big Victorian house on the outskirts of London. Your mother (her mother) is not dead. She had a close call in a train crash two years ago. Listen: your mother is calling you (her) now.

Michael Lawrence's gripping thriller about a boy and a girl who are the same person—but not quite—will have you turning the pages late into the night...and talking and thinking and wondering about the shifting nature of identity, time, space, and the cracks that can appear in a train rail, a lifeline, and a family tree.

Michael Lawrence has been writing children's books since 1995, and is best-known for his Jiggy McCue novels. He lived for many years in Cambridgeshire, not far from the house in which he was born, the house that is Withern Rise in the Aldous Lexicon Trilogy.