Secret Heart

A powerful new novel from one of today’s most exciting and innovative children’s writers, a past winner of the Whitbread Award and Carnegie Medal and author of the bestselling Skellig.

Joe lives with his mother in Helmouth, a forgotten village crumbling on the edge of the suburbs. Into Joe’s unhappy world comes Hackenschmidt’s Circus, and with it the strangely familiar Corinna. She tells Joe, ‘In the circus there is a secret heart’—a place of contained wildness where the barriers between the human and animal worlds are fluid. And indeed, Joe’s dreams are already stalked by a tiger, so real that Joe’s skin and its pelt begin to feel as one…