Melvin Burgess

It was a mistake for Ben to tell the Hunter that there were still wolves in Surrey. For the Hunter was a fanatic, always on the lookout for unusual prey. Driven by an ambition to wipe out the last English wolves, the Hunter set out on a savage quest. But what happens when the Hunter becomes the hunted?

I can give it up any time I want . . . Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space. This time it was Lily and Rob and Gemma spending all that time to make me feel one of them, but it was the drug too. All that crap--about Gemma leaving me, about Mum and Dad, about leaving home. All that negative stuff. All the pain . . . It just floated away from me, I just floated away from it . . . up and away . . . I leaned back and I looked at the book and I looked at them and Gemma smiled at me, a big soft smile, and her eyes were like marbles. Better? she said. Smack is the winner of the 1996 Carnegie Medal in Literature.

Billy Elliot's not like his Dad. He doesn't want to learn boxing. He's not cut out to be a miner. But when he stumbles across a ballet class and discovers he's a natural, he realises what he does want to do. This is Billy's gritty and determined struggle, at first in secret, but then with the wholehearted backing of his family, to dance his way to a different future.

Tar loves Gemma, but Gemma doesn't want to be tied down - not to anyone or anything. Gemma wants to fly. But no one can fly forever. One day, somehow, finally you have to come down. Commissioned and produced by Oxford Stage Company, Junk premiered at The Castle, Wellingborough, in January 1998 and went on to tour throughout the UK in 1998 and 1999." John Retallack's excellent adaptation of Melvin Burgess's controversial Carnegie Medal winning novel is splendidly unpatronising...a truly cautionary tale" (Independent)