Excerpt from Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'What are you smirking about?' asked Roy Pursey.

'Nothing,' said Noel.

'What's in the notebook?'

'Nothing,' said Noel, again. Roy snatched it and squinted at the rows of symbols.

'It's gobbledegook,' he said.

Noel took it back, quietly satisfied. It was a very simple code called 'Pigpen' and he had just written Roy Pursey is the most ignorant and unpleasant boy in Rhyll Street Junior School.

The train gathered speed through the suburbs. Noel wrote down a list of other people who ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. The next time that he glanced out of the window, he saw a field, with a goat.

'It's a cow!' shouted a Ferris twin.

'And there's a horse getting on top of another horse,' said Shirley Green. 'Right on top of it. Why's it doing that, Mr Waring?'

'If a train travels at an average speed of forty-five miles per hour for three and a half hours,' said Mr Waring, 'and then an average speed of twenty-two miles an hour for five and a quarter hours, what distance would it have covered?'

Noel wrote two hundred and seventy-three miles in his notebook and then stared out at the mild, flat countryside. The train was beginning to slow again.

'Are we there yet?' asked one of the Ferris twins.

'We've only just left London, Doreen,' said Mr Waring.

The train slowed still further. Red-brick villas appeared outside the window.

'It's a town,' said Roy Pursey. There was a spire visible above the rooftops.

'City,' corrected Mr Waring. 'It's St Albans.'

'You're not supposed to tell anyone, sir,' said Roy Pursey. 'A spy might be listening.'

'And which of your comrades do you suspect of being in the pay of the Third Reich?'

'It's not me,' said Harvey Madeley.

'A classic double-bluff,' said Mr Waring. 'Harvey's your spy.'

Roy shook his head and looked pointedly at Noel. 'No, sir. It would be someone who started coming to our school out of nowhere six months ago, and who never speaks and when he does it's posh and who writes everything down.'

'We're stopping at a station,' said Doreen Ferris, excitedly. 'We're here!'

A big woman with a green hat and yellow teeth smiled brightly at them through the window.

'Hello, little Londoners,' she shouted. 'Welcome to safety.'