Aidan Chambers

Using a pillow book as her form, nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn sets out to write out her life for her unborn daughter. What emerges is a portrait of an extraordinary girl, who writes frankly of love, sex, poetry, nature, faith, and of herself in the world. Her thoughts range widely: on Shakespeare and breasts, periods and piano playing, friendship and trees, consciousness and sleep, and much more besides. As she writes of William Blacklin, the boy...

I saw a face, bloated, much larger than any face I'd ever seen before. It hung in the air above me, and there was no sign of a body, just the swollen truncated head. The eyes were sunk deep into their sockets. Thick stringy hair fell in tangled knots from the crown of the skull. The skin on the face was blotched with festering patches, as though it had been violently bruised. The lips were drawn wide and taut across the mouth, revealing the teeth...

Alternates between two stories--comtemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.