A Lovereading4kids 'Great Read' you may have missed 2011 selection.
Dripping in blood, this is a story of family secrets so terrible that they shouldn’t be uncovered...Rowan and Clara think they are ordinary teenagers. They live quietly with their ordinary Mum and Dad doing all the things that their friends do. But, the Radley parents are hiding a secret; they are abstaining vampires and, one day, their abstinence will fail. Rowan’s teenage anxieties and sense of being an outsider take on a whole new dimension in this insight story of adolescence with a difference.
This is the Young Adult version of the title. Click here for the original edition.
Meet the Radleys: Peter, Helen and their teenage kids Clara and Rowan. An everyday family who live in a pretty English village and juggle dysfunctional lives. So far, so normal. Except, as Peter and Helen know (but the kids have yet to find out), the Radleys happen to be a family of abstaining vampires. When one night Clara finds herself driven to commit a bloodthirsty act of violence, her parents need to explain a few things: why is their skin is so sensitive to light, why do they all find garlic so repulsive, and why has Clara's recent decision to go vegan had quite such an effect on her behaviour...? But when mysterious Uncle Will swoops into the village, he unleashes a host of shadowy truths and dark secrets that threaten to destroy the Radleys and the world around them.
'A refreshing alternative to much of the paranormal fodder out there.' The Bookseller
'Matt Haig takes an original and witty approach to the supernatural genre in this quirky young adult novel...Cleverly balancing light and dark notes, this coming-of -age story with a difference is a refreshing alternative to the vampire theme.' Booktrust
Author
About Matt Haig
Matt Haig is the number one bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet and six highly acclaimed novels for adults, including How to Stop Time, The Humans and The Radleys. He has also written many books for children, including most recently the Sunday Times bestseller, The Truth Pixie, and he has won the Blue Peter Book Award, the Smarties Book Prize and been nominated three times for the Carnegie Medal. He has sold more than a million books in the UK and his work has been translated into over forty languages.