But whether he'll ever make it back is put immediately in doubt when a group of thugs start to chase him down the street, wanting to hurt him from the moment they see him.Īt no point does Sutcliffe tell us that the boy, Joshua, is Israeli or that the people on the other side of the wall are Palestinian.
The tunnel is barely a few hundred feet long, and the town of Amarias, where he lives with his mother and stepfather, is just a short distance away, on the other side of the wall, under which the tunnel burrows. Crawling through the tunnel, he emerges into a wholly unfamiliar world.īut unlike in those stories of Narnia and Wonderland and Oz, the boy who passes through the portal knows exactly where he is, and how far – or rather, close – he is to home. He climbs over the boundary wall to search for it and finds a flattened house that was once "the home of people from the other side" and, beside it, the entrance to a dark tunnel. A boy loses his football in a plot of land that no one must enter, and no one ever leaves. N o one who has loved children's stories of portals into strange worlds could resist the beginning of William Sutcliffe's startling and captivating new novel.
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