Product Description

A chilling and dramatic tale of belief and freedom, of imprisonment and of escape - from multi-award-winning author Anne Fine

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76327 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-31
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Synopsis
Told who to cheer for, who to believe in, Yuri grows up in a country where no freedom of thought is encouraged - where even one's neighbours are encouraged to report any dissension to the authorities. But it is still a shock when a few careless words lead him to a virtual death-sentence - sent on a nightmare journey up north to a camp amidst the frozen wastes. What, or who, can he possibly believe in now? Can he even survive? And is escape possible ...?

From the Inside Flap
Before I was even seven, I swear I could spell `The Glorious Revolution'…
`Glorious Lie, more like,' is what Yuri's grandmother calls it.Everyone believes what they're told and everyone knows who to cheer for, now that the Czar has gone.

But people still vanish sometimes.
No one sees anything, or hears anything.
And no one ever comes back.

Yuri knows this. But he never dreams that he too could be considered an `enemy of the state' simply for letting drop a few careless words.

Now he's taking his first steps on a road to despair.
A road built on the bones of those who dared to oppose.

A road to a new Yuri…

A chilling and dramatic adventure that also challenges the nature of beliefs, and how these can be taken and twisted to justify acts of real horror and inhumanity.

Truly a novel for our times.

From a multi-award-winning author.

From the Back Cover
ANNE FINE

`She is translated into 30 languages and has regularly won every major children's literary award in the land, including the Carnegie Medal twice and the Whitbread Children's Novel award twice . . .

Customer Reviews

Very disturbing novel
This book is a disturbing account of life in a totalitarian state (nameless though that state remains, it could have been Russia or Mao's China, I guess). Yuri is a character I came to view like Winston in 1984. It's a moving account and the disturbing bit about it was, how does a writer put across the enormity of what happened to countless numbers of innocent people effectively? I am not sure at the end whether Fine achieves her objective. Is some of the horror lost? The accounts of shovelling dead bodies - how do you put that across to teen readers - I don't know the answer. However, Fine has conveyed much of the despair of the individual in this book, and I would highly, highly recommend it. Perhaps the only part that really jars with me is when Yuri drops a body and its eyes fly open. Would that really happen? Also, the ending is vague. I read it four times and still think about its meaning. But, a valuable contribution to the genre.

A dystopian masterpiece
Reminiscent of Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", 'Road of Bones' tells the story of the teenage years of Yuri, from his home-life, with its ever increasing restrictions imposed from outside, to his initial evasion of capture from the authorities before an eventual internment in a labour camp, and his subsequent efforts to survive.

Although the characters have Russian names, neither Russia nor the Soviet Union are actually mentioned by name as the location of the book. The setting, instead, is an imagined totalitarian state, but it's one whose circumstances have clearly been based on history - and powerful history it is too. This is extremely evocative and compelling stuff, nowhere more so than the frightening conclusion which demonstrates the potential power of context over objective thought - good, no matter how pure, can be twisted and warped to mirror its opposite if given no encouragement beyond itself.

Fear, horror, and it's really really cold!
Road of bones is set in what appears to be Russia. It starts off as a fairly routine book about spys, fear, and child labour. Then when the protagonist breaks a silence he has contended with for most of his life horrific events line up to confront him. Although the majority of Anne Fine 's novels have been comical and light hearted this one touches a more serious and dangerous topic. It is an interesting read. worth paying attention to.