Winner of the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize Best Fiction for Teens Award 2015 - Shortlisted for The Branford Boase Award 2015. Important questions are posed in this richly imagined and fast-paced supernatural thriller with big themes at its heart. Nathan lives in a world that is very similar to our own. But it has one very big difference: there is a record kept of all the witches that are alive. Everyone must be classified as White, Black or Fain/ Non-Witch. White and Black witches are divided into ferociously hostile factions with notorious skirmishes between the two. Only one thing unites the two sides: fear of a boy with an inheritance from both sides. That boy is Nathan…Nathan’s mixed parentage makes him impossible to classify and it makes him dangerous. Soon everyone is after Nathan. Is he a hero or an outcast? And can he survive? - One of our Books of the Year 2014 - One of the Lovereading4kids Readers' Choice Books of the Year 2014 - March 2014 Debut of the Month
This thrilling YA debut (rights now sold in 42 territories!) will do for witches what Twilight did for vampires… In fact, film rights have already been snapped up by the company that made the Cullens famous.
The inspiration for the Netflix series The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself "An enthralling fantasy in the Harry Potter tradition."-Time magazine "A bewitching new thriller."-The Wall Street Journal
In a modern-day England where two warring factions of witches live alongside humans, one sixteen-year-old boy is trapped between the two sides. Nathan's father is the world's most powerful and cruel witch, and his mother is dead. Both groups of witches see Nathan as their greatest threat-or their greatest weapon. Trapped in a cage, beaten and handcuffed, he must escape before his seventeenth birthday, at which point he will receive three gifts from his father and come into his own as a witch-or else he will die. But how can Nathan find his father when his every action is tracked, when there is no one safe to trust, not even family, not even the girl he loves?
In the tradition of Patrick Ness and Markus Zusak, Half Bad is a gripping tale of alienation and the indomitable will to survive, a story that will grab hold of you and not let go until the very last page.
Now streaming on Netflix as The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself.
Sally Green lives in north-west England with her husband and son. She has had various jobs and even a profession but in 2010 she discovered a love of writing and now just can’t stop. She used to keep chickens, makes decent jam, doesn't mind ironing, loves to walk in Wales even when it's raining, and will probably never jog again. She really ought to drink less coffee.