The boy who saw too much and too little

Already a bestseller in the many countries where it has been published, I’m Not Scared was described to me as a modern version of The Go-Between. After struggling through the wooden introduction to a group of children cycling up a hill somewhere in the south of Italy, I was steeling myself for one of those second-rate bits of whimsy like Silk or Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress which unaccountably become international bestsellers. But the secret soon discovered by Michele, the child-narrator, is not just emotionally confusing like the illicit love affair to which the boy is made accessory in L. P. Hartley’s novel, but a very real horror. The dust- jacket is coy about it, but it’s not giving much away to reveal that Michele stumbles across a kidnap victim, a boy of his own age who is being held to ransom in foul conditions by a group including Michele’s father, with the silent collusion of his mother.