Nothing - Softcover

'I love this bold, beautiful, terrifying book. One of the greatest young adult books I have ever read.' --David Almond, author of Skellig.

'This uncompromising novel has all the marks of a classic.' --Booklist

'Rivals Lord Of The Flies for horror' --Kirkus Reviews

Being staged by Glyndebourne as an opera in Feb 2016, featured on BBC Radio 4 recently and with a theatre production at Manchester Royal Exchange coming too. An irresistible novel about everything... A Lord of the Flies for the twenty-first century, Nothing is controversial, shocking and thought-provoking. It is also accessible and beautifully told. Its simplicity belies its depth. Nothing matters. From the moment you are born, you start to die. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. You will live to be a maximum of one hundred. Life isn not worth the bother! So says Pierre Anthon when he decides that there is no meaning to life, leaves the classroom, climbs a plum tree, and stays there. His friends and classmates cannot get him to come down, not even by pelting him with rocks. So to prove to him that there is a meaning to life, they set out to build a heap of meaning in an abandoned sawmill. But it soon becomes obvious that each person cannot give up what is most meaningful, so they begin to decide for one another what the others must give up. As the demands become more extreme, events begin to take a morbid turn.