I wasn’t expecting to be able to find Stephen Baxter’s The H-Bomb Girl in the US. Amazon says it won’t be available until May 1st. But while I was in Berkeley I dropped into The Other Change of Hobbit and had a copy available. And as I’ve been doing a lot of sitting on BART I finished it very quickly.

The book does riff off the Anti-Americanism that I’ve been seeing way too much of in Britain over the last couple of years, but aside from that it is very nicely done. I was a little too young to understand the Cuba missile crisis properly, but I do remember it, so the book does have a certain resonance with me. But basically if you set a YA novel in Liverpool in 1962, how can you go wrong? Good choice, Clarke judges.