The Other Side of the Whale Road - K.A. Hayton

SHORTLISTED: New Angle Prize SHORTLISTED: East Anglian Book Awards SHORTLISTED: Chicken House Competition How dark were the Dark Ages? Joss is about to find out... When his mum burns down their house on the Whitehorse estate after too many vodkas, sixteen-year-old Joss is sent to live with welcoming foster-carers in a sleepy Suffolk village. The place is steeped in history, as streetwise Joss learns first-hand when a bike accident pitches him back more than a thousand years to the Anglo-Saxon encampment of Haegelisdun. He is soon living in the village: tending the fields, eating lumpy porridge and dense bread and sleeping on a rock-hard bed. But he has read his history, so he knows his new friends Aesc, Merwenna and Leofric – as well as his thuggish rival Wuffa – are in peril from a forthcoming Viking invasion. Risking execution by mistrustful Anglo-Saxon warriors as well as slaughter by the Danes, can he warn the doomed King Edmund in time? And what will it mean for Joss’s troubled family – and his turbulent relationship with new girlfriend Alice – if he ever gets home?