Oona is angry. She’s so furious that she walks into the lake with all of her clothes on and swims farther than she ever has before – over to the other side. The water scrapes against her strangely, and she gets a deep cut.

On the opposite shore, the landscape has changed and the people seem slightly odd, and no one has a mobile phone. A flying lizard? A mind-reader? People living in sheds? Daylight scares them? When Oona starts working in a shoe factory, she understands that some kind of evil is enveloping the whole village. Why won’t anyone talk about it?

The Scale is a youth novel that flits as smoothly as a lizard from one time, and one reality, to another. It ladles out a mixture of recent history, vampire stories, and pure fantasy. What if the world was just the tiniest bit different – by a cat’s whisker or the width of a lizard’s scale?