"Perhaps all the best books," wrote Robert Westall in Signal, "start by being written for only one child, and that child very close to you. They start when the child-within-the-author turns to the real child and says, 'Come away with me and I will show you a place you otherwise will never see, because it is buried under thirty, or three hundred or three thousand years of time.'" Westall bases this opinion on personal experience: it was not until he attempted to recreate his childhood as fiction for his twelve-year-old son that he emerged as a successful writer. The careful recollection for his son of the tensions of a childhood spent in wartime England resulted in Westall's first novel, The Machine Gunners, and immediately made him a prominent figure in contemporary young adult literature.

Since the publication of The Machine Gunners, Westall has written many well-received novels...