Dusk

Dusk is a product of a military medical research centre – human, but with the genetic coding of a hawk imprinted on her own. She is held, drugged in a laboratory, until she can be of some use to the authorities.

When the lab burns down Dusk escapes into an environment she knows nothing about and is befriended by Jay – himself a loner, torn between his anxious, overworked mother and his drunken father. Together they learn to communicate, to re-forge their identities and to trust each other.

There are dramatic, tightly-written scenes depicting the terrifying warfare between the rats who are liberated from the lab at the same time as Dusk and who battle for control of the territory which human beings have now abandoned – a clear allegory for a world laid waste by war and corruption.

Dusk is a warning – one which we can’t afford to ignore and which will resonate strongly with able teenage readers, immersed in the threat of global terrorism. To what lengths do we go to defeat a potential enemy and how do we look to the consequences of our actions? Nearer home – Jay and Dusk are metaphors, perhaps, for that lost race of young people who have no stable home life and so are prey to whatever influence may seek them out.