The Returners

by Gemma Malley

Overview

London teenager Will Hodge is miserable. His mother is dead, his father's political leanings have grown radical, and his friends barely talk to him. To top it off, he's having nightmares about things like concentration camps. Then Will notices he's being followed by a group of people who claim to know him from another time in history. It turns out they are Returners, reincarnated people who carry with them the memory of atrocities they have witnessed in the past. Will realizes that he, too, is a Returner. But something about his memories is different, and with dawning horror, Will suspects that he wasn't just a witness to the events, he was instrumental in making them happen. Set in the near future, with the world on the verge of a new wave of ethnic cleansing, Will must choose to confront the cruelty he's known in his past lives, or be doomed to repeat it...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781599908038
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	04/10/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Gemma Malley studied Philosophy at Reading University before working as a journalist. She edited several business magazines and contributed regularly to Company magazine and the Sunday Telegraph before moving into the Civil Service in a senior communications role at Ofsted. The Declaration, her first novel for a teenage audience, and its sequel, The Resistance, were published to critical acclaim. She lives in South London.

Editorial Reviews

George Santayana famously warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This novel is about the condemned, those souls who return to relive the past. Will Hodge is only a teenager, miserable in a world where his mother is dead, his father can't be trusted and friends barely speak to him anymore. He's haunted by nightmares from the distant past. They're bleak, full of cruelty and painful images he can't shake. In the midst of all this, he witnesses a friend try to help a victim of street assault . . . or was he the one who committed the crime? Will is told he is one of the Returners, condemned to live out past horrors and commit new ones, to serve as humanity's collective memory. Will has a decision to make: Will he choose to repeat the past? Or create a new and different path? A strange book that will capture the attention of some while leaving others confused, it presents readers with the challenge that is always passed on to the next generation-the world is theirs and will become what they make of it. A good read, but not for everyone. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

Kirkus Reviews