A girl wakes up with no knowledge of who she is or what has happened in her past. All she knows is that she is on a driverless bus speeding along a coastline with six other people on board, none of whom look familiar. They each have a name on their chest, but are those really their names, and why are some people in red shirts and some in blue? They are given a thought experiment to which they must respond: the classic Trolley Problem. They must choose between one person dying or many and this is actually happening because they can see people on the road ahead, right where the bus is heading.

It’s a plot with as many twists and turns as the treacherous road the bus is driving along. There is a cast of diverse and all too humanly flawed characters, including our narrator, Cecily, who feels lust for the hot guy on the bus who smells familiar, but is also attracted to the sharp cheek-boned and angry girl with the beautifully decorated prosthetic leg. Tantalising snippets and articles are also interspersed throughout the narrative about a mysterious ‘Blue Fairy’ who has something to do with all these characters.

Lili Wilkinson has followed up her doomsday-prepper novel of two years ago, After the Lights Go Out, with an equally compelling novel that is action-packed but also delivers some real moral dilemmas about good and evil, asking the reader whether people can change their basic character. This pacey thriller will be devoured by readers aged 14+.

Angela Crocombe is the manager of Readings Kids.