By the end of chapter two, nine-year-old Will has lost both parents: his soldier father has been killed in Iraq, and his mother, on a holiday to Indonesia intended to help herself and Will to recover from their loss, drowns in the Boxing Day tsunami. This lovely reading comprehension also comes with a set of questions, which test how well the children have understood the text. Well, there was a bomb by the side of the road, and he was in a Land Rover …” She reached out across the table and took my hands in hers. I remembered how, up in the areoplane, when Mum woke she leaned over me, brushing my hair away from my eyes. Children will enjoy developing their reading skills and answering the questions included which may spark a love of reading that will last a lifetime!

Sometimes when I was quite sure no one else was around, I’d even talk to him, and tell him my troubles.That was when I came across the picture of an elephant walking along a beach, and being ridden by a boy no older than I was. Our lovely teacher and design teams have solved the issue and the new version is now available to download. It was the house where Dad had grown up, the place we’d always been for every single Christmas of my life, whether Dad was home on leave or not.

This was a million miles from everything that had happened, from everything that had brought me here. But memories of the train journey with Mum came tumbling out, out of my control and out of sequence, as memories often are, because memories will always become other memories, I suppose – they cannot help themselves.I could see what it was now – a helicopter, glinting in the sunlight up above the canopy of the trees. I enjoyed the real life links the author described at the end of the book too with the Asian Tsunai and the Iraq war. After more than a year in the jungle, Will comes across Doctor Geraldine, a lone scientist who has devoted her life to the saving and rehabilitation of the threatened orang-utans, a small, heroic activity set against the slow obliteration of the species.

He sits outside the series-driven blockbusters so beloved of publishers nowadays: he hasn't created a Harry Potter or an Alex Rider – and I admire him for resisting that.The first Will knows that anything is wrong is when Oona, the elephant he is riding along the beach, begins to spook. Understanding this first, then simply accepting it, seemed to enable me to calm down enough to think straight. Usually I can’t remember jokes, but I always remembered this one, maybe because Dad told it so often. Exhausted and angry, I lay down in the howdah, which I now thought of more as a cage than a throne, and sobbed. There was no beach to be seen any more now, and as I watched I saw that the hotel itself was surrounded entirely by seawater, the first floor already overwhelmed.