Truth or Dare
By Celia Rees
Published by Macmillan
Price £9.99
Age 10+

Joshua has been given no choice but to accompany his mother to visit his grandmother following her stroke. The holiday ahead looks bleak, and even bleaker when he discovers how ill his grandmother is.

Her eventual death and its aftermath lead Josh and his mother on separate searches to make sense of the facts at their disposal. The focus of the unease is the fate of Josh's uncle, Patrick, whose name generates such tension amongst his surviving family. In threading the narrative strands together, Rees recounts a terrible human tragedy - the denial of a child to the extent that his death is faked. For various reasons this has taken a terrible toll on those left in ignorance.

Patrick did not die. It was simply not convenient, in his father's eyes, for him to live. A difficult child - and the implication is that Asberger's Syndrome caused the dislocation with his surroundings - he was institutionalised for years, before being rehabilitated by someone who recognised in him an extraordinary, creative talent.

This is a compelling examination of the wreckage resulting from a determination to force conformity on an individual.