Five Hundred Miles

For brothers Cole and Ruben it’s another rainy morning in the badlands of East London, selling dodgy paperwork for even dodgier motors. But arriving in a pub on their latest errand, the brothers stumble across a trio of gangsters, a girl, and a monkey in a cage – and their entire day is knocked off course.

About the Author

Kevin Brooks won the Branford Boase Award for first-time children’s novelists with Martyn Pig, establishing him as a major voice in teen and YA fiction, and The Bunker Diary won him the Carnegie Medal in 2014. Kevin is committed to children who don’t read as much as those who do, saying, “I’ve never quite understood why – and this is something I feel really passionate about – our business as a whole seems to focus so much on a relatively small default audience of young readers (which gets even smaller as the target-age group increases), and we forget about the much larger potential audience that’s undoubtedly out there. It’s almost as if there’s a general acceptance that these kids don’t read, so there’s no point in reaching out to them. But I wonder if a big part of the reason they don’t read – or think they don’t like reading – is that we don’t give them a chance because we don’t reach out to them.”