Tamar: Love, Espionage and Betrayal

Description

Winner of the Carnegie Medal, Tamar is Mal Peet's astonishing novel about love, lies and secrets in a time of war. Mal Peet's Carnegie Medal-winning novel. When her grandfather dies, Tamar inherits a box containing a series of clues and coded messages. Out of the past, another Tamar emerges, a man involved in the terrifying world of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland half a century earlier. His story is one of passionate love, jealousy and tragedy set against the daily fear and casual horror of the Second World War. Unravelling it will transform the younger Tamar's life...

Mal Peet's first novel, Keeper, won the Branford Boase Award and the Bronze Nestle Children's Book Prize; Tamar won the Carnegie Medal; and Exposure was the winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. A writer and illustrator, Mal produced many books for children throughout his lifetime, most of them in collaboration with his wife, Elspeth Graham.

This sombre and distinguished book is as fine a piece of storytelling as you are likely to read this year. * The Guardian * Mal Peet, who won the Branford Boase Award in 2004 for Keeper, has written a complex and rewarding novel which is two stories in one. Peet moves effortlessly and skilfully between the 1940s and the present and the characters are strong and well-drawn. Terrific stuff. * TES Teacher * This is an outstanding novel. Outstanding in every regard. It establishes Peet as a novelist of immense gift and versatility, for no two novels could be more different than Keeper and Tamar and yet be so equally brilliant ... Utterly convincing. * www.achuka.co.uk * ... one of the very best novels I have encountered in recent years. -- Siobhan Parkinson * INIS * "A fascinating and complex story, set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of Holland. Beautifully crafted, with a finale that took my breath away, this is simply unforgettable." * Publishing News *