Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Children's Book Award.
Waking up as someone he’s never even met is the strangest experience of Flip’s life. Suddenly he’s Philip – or Flip – and nothing and no-one is familiar any more; the house, his ‘mother’, even his own face have all changed and no one can tell him why. Then there’s school, friends – a whole world to be navigated but without any help! How Alex works his way through the extraordinary situation is a gripping and questioning psychological thriller.
Titles shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Children's Book Award:
Fourteen-year-old Alex Gray wakes up one morning to discover he's not in his own bedroom. More surprising is that he doesn't recognize his hands, or his legs... When he looks in the mirror he gets the shock of his life! How is it possible that Alex has become another boy - a boy who everyone calls Philip? And how have six whole months passed overnight? A riveting psychological thriller by a brilliant new voice in children's books.
Martyn Bedford is the author of five novels for adults and two for young adults. He has also had numerous short stories published in anthologies, newspapers and magazines and broadcast on radio and the Internet. Martyn is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he studied under Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. He is a senior associate lecturer in creative writing at Leeds Trinity University College and has previously taught at Manchester, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan universities, as well as an academic writing residency at Leeds Trinity as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. His creative-writing teaching also includes school groups and residential courses for the Arvon Foundation and he was a founding consultant and critic-in-residence for the online writing forum YouWriteOn.com. He was a fiction critic for the Literary Review (2000–2009) and previously reviewed for the New Statesman. Before becoming a writer and teacher, Martyn worked for thirteen years as a journalist in regional newspapers all over the UK.
Martyn was born and grew up in Croydon, south London, but has lived for many years in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, with his wife and two daughters.
