Book review
Written by Terry Pratchett
Doubleday hardback
Release date Out now

A shipwreck brings two very different survivors' lives crashing together...

It might be billed as one of Terry Pratchett's novels for children, but Nation is one of the most philosophical stories that the Carnegie Award winning writer has ever penned. It takes the tropes from all the different "desert island" tales – from Robinson Crusoe right through to Lost – and uses them to make the reader think about the nature of faith and community.

Set on a parallel world somewhere around the late 19th Century, Nation's location is just different enough from our own not to take anything for granted. The flora and fauna are similar, but with some Discworldian touches, and the heroine Ermintrude (or rather, Daphne, as she decides to christen herself) has a familiar enough background that most of the time we can guess how she'll react.

However, Mau, the sole survivor of the original Nation, is a blank canvas, and Pratchett shows his transition from being simply a member of a society to the co-founder of a new one, complete with mistakes and rites of passage.

It wouldn't be a Pratchett novel without some humour, and there's a welcome return for Pratchett's unique brand of footnotes. It's almost heretical to suggest it, but Discworld sometimes becomes quite "same-y" and Pratchett's writing seems revitalised with this new setting.

The book ends with some authorial suggestions, the most of important of which closes out the volume with the same sort of insidious suggestion that the entire book has been riddled with. Paul Simpson

VERDICT: 8/10
A book designed to make children of all ages think.

Click here to buy Nation at Forbidden Planet (forbiddenplanet.com)