Shortlisted for Children’s Book Award 2016, Books for Younger Readers category - Shortlisted for the Waterstone's Best Fiction for 5-12's Award 2015 - Shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award 2015 Best Story From the seventeenth floor of the tower block where he lives with his mother, Ade watches as the buildings fall around him. The Bluchers - a strange and terrible kind of plant - are taking over the city, and everyone is being forced to evacuate, but his mother is refusing to leave her room. And so Ade watches alone as the city slowly empties, and the Bluchers creep ever closer...
When they first arrived, they came quietly and stealthily as if they tip-toed into the world when we were all looking the other way. Ade loves living at the top of a tower block. From his window, he feels like he can see the whole world stretching out beneath him. His mum doesn't really like looking outside - but it's going outside that she hates.
She's happier sleeping all day inside their tower, where it's safe. But one day, other tower blocks on the estate start falling down around them and strange, menacing plants begin to appear. Now their tower isn't safe anymore. Ade and his mum are trapped and there's no way out...
This matches a dystopian plot with a hugely engaging narrator ... An unusual and very impressive debut. -- Fiona Noble The Bookseller
Haunting and compelling, with characters you really care for -- Vanessa Lewis The Bookseller
I loved it and I think you - whoever you are, whether you're aged eight or eighty - will love it, too. Boy In The Tower comes highly recommended by me. I think it might even be my favourite story of 2014 so far.
Author
About Polly Ho-Yen
Polly Ho-Yen used to be a primary school teacher in London and while she was teaching there she would get up very early in the morning to write stories. The first of those stories became her critically acclaimed debut novel Boy in the Tower, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and FCBG Children’s Book Award. All four of her middle-grade novels – including Fly Me Home, Where Monster’s Lie and How I Saved the World in a Week – have been nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Polly’s previous younger fiction novel, The Boy Who Grew a Tree was shortlisted for the Teach Primary 2022 book awards, and featured in the 2023 Read for Empathy collection (primary). The book is also currently shortlisted for the inaugural The Week Junior Book Awards, in the Younger Fiction category.
She lives in Bristol with her husband and daughter.
