The Messengers

"Perhaps we're here to save a few people. Maybe that's the gift."Fifteen-year-old Frances has been sent down to the coast for a little break. Her brother, Johnny, is out on bail after punching an off-duty policeman, and some shady characters have thrown a brick through the window of their flat. Frances's mum went off to stay with her boyfriend and Frances is sent to Helmstown, to live with her aunt, uncle and cousin Max. Frances befriends Peter Kennedy, a somewhat tramp-like character who lives in a beach hut along the Helmstown seafront. As soon as they meet, Peter recognizes that Frances is a messenger, just like him. As messengers, Frances and Peter experience black-outs. Afterwards, when they come round, they have the ability to draw, in minute detail, the scene of an accident. Peter lives with the burden of telling the people in his drawings about the circumstances of their death. He believes that if he doesn't, something bad will happen to his family. While Frances lives in dread of anything happening to her brother Johnny, she begins to think more positively: although she can't change the past, she can change the future, at least for a chosen few. Another compelling and thrilling novel for teenagers by the young author of the highly acclaimed Daylight Saving.

From School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up—After her older brother almost kills someone in a bar fight and disappears, Frances, a promising young artist, starts seeing strange things in her drawings. They materialize out of nowhere after she blacks out. She can't figure out why these images are hazy and imprecise—until she puts one of them under a scanner, and learns with the help of her mentor Peter, another "messenger," that each one reveals where and when someone is going to die. Peter's convinced that they're just a couple of killers, but Frances might have a plan to change all that, using their premonitions to save lives rather than end them, and maybe find her brother, presumed dead, in the process. But do they have the power, or the right, to change fate? That's only one of the weighty questions explored in this clever page-turner. VERDICT A mash-up of philosophy, mystery, and horror, this haunting YA novel takes on all of these subjects with satisfying results.—Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY

School Library Journal (starred review) The story poses the kind of ethical questions so popular in basic philosophy courses: if you had the opportunity to save a complete stranger at great risk to you or your family, would you do it? Since such quandaries are the stuff of teen existential exploration, this will please those of a philosophical as well as a supernatural turn of mind.

A mash-up of philosophy, mystery, and horror, this haunting YA novel takes on all of these subjects with satisfying results

About the Author

Edward Hogan is the author of Daylight Saving and two adult novels: Blackmoor, which won the Desmond Elliott prize in the U.K. and was short-listed for both the London Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Hunger Trace. He lives in Brighton, England.

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