As he slowly begins to starve, his thoughts turn to the events that have led him there. Fifteen-year-old Shorty is trapped in the pitch-dark rubble of a hospital room, where he was recovering from a bullet wound. The story opens in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake. Will serious teenage readers like it? Why wouldn't they? It's very good. It has a complex structure, deals with sometimes brutally unsympathetic characters, and tells the story, both modern and historical, of Haiti, a country that doesn't figure high on most school curricula.

Nick Lake's In Darkness is just the kind of book that might attract this brand of unfair criticism. I read both bestsellers and more obscure fare – anything that might give the remotest clue to the world outside my suburb. It's certainly not how I read when I was young. It's actually a bit of an insult to young readers to assume that a challenging, literary book must automatically be off-putting, and it's not at all my experience of the young readers I meet. Just because you read the latest Booker winner doesn't mean you don't also read the latest Scandinavian corpse-fiest, and vice versa. Young readers are as varied as adult readers, and as eclectic in their individual tastes. But this, I think, works from an incorrect premise: that there is only one sort of child reader. T here are occasionally voices in the children's book world who argue that the kind of serious children's novels that win prizes and get newspaper reviews are, in fact, books that are only loved by prize judges and middle-aged reviewers, not by kids themselves.

In Darkness by Nick Lake