Wonderland

There are novels that tell you about a world, and then there are novels that put you inside one, pulsing with music, smelling of hairspray and sea air, alive with longing and belonging. Wonderland is emphatically the latter.

Patience Agbabi’s young adult verse novel follows Tamilola, who has moved from London to Colwyn Bay with her mum, trailing anxiety and a feeling of dislocation behind her. The North Wales coast of the 1980s is not an obvious backdrop for self-discovery, but Agbabi makes it sing, quite literally. When Tamilola finds the Wonderland club on Colwyn Bay Pier and the Northern Soul scene it belongs to, she finds something more precious than music: she finds her people. The novel becomes a portrait of a tribe, each member carrying their own identity and backstory, played out across the clubs, record shops and cafés of an era rendered with forensic affection.

What makes this book extraordinary is the verse. Agbabi slips between poetic styles with breathtaking ease, and the form is never decorative; it is structural. The poetry beats like the music Tamilola lives for, propelling the narrative forward while simultaneously giving it texture and depth. Certain poems stop you altogether. ‘Rhyl Seafront’ and ‘Grey’ are the kind of set-pieces you want to fold into your pocket and keep, so descriptive and evocative that you find yourself returning to them long after the plot has moved on.

This is also, in many ways, a superb historical novel. Agbabi captures a vanished world: the clothes sewn by hand to be exactly the right style, the subterfuge of changing outfits before a night out, the rivalry with the mods, and the particular pre-internet ache of trying to track down a rare song, knowing your only hope was haunting record shops until you found it. Young readers will recognise the yearning; the specific texture of that yearning will be entirely new to them.

Wonderland is joyful and powerful, a love letter to music, to found family, and to the transformative power of a place where you feel you belong and fit. It deserves to be read aloud, danced to, and pressed insistently into the right hands.