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Gone

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Book Synopsis

Welcome to the FAYZ! The first book in the bestselling cult YA thriller series GONE that Stephen King calls a ‘driving, torrential narrative’.

In the blink of an eye all the adults disappear in a small town in southern California and no one knows why.

Cut off from the outside world, those that are left are trapped, and there’s no help on the way. Sam Temple and his friends must do all they can to survive. Chaos rules the streets. Gangs begin to form. Sides are chosen – strong or weak. Cruel or humane.

And then there are those who begin to develop powers …

The GONE series is Lord of the Flies for the 21st century. In turns breathtaking, harrowing, and utterly terrifying. Its complex characters and moral dilemmas will delight fans of The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner. This is dystopian fiction at its best.

Our Review Panel says...

Sam Temple was in history class when the teacher disappears. Moving out of the classroom, the class discovers everyone aged 15 or over has vanished. Exploring a world that has become suddenly eerily quiet, the kids discover they are trapped by a mysterious wall that surrounds their town and, with the telephone and internet down, no means of communicating outside of it.

Many of the kids look to “School Bus Sam” to lead them, but he has a secret that keeps him from wanting to step up. Then the arrival of the kids from Coates, the strange school from out of town, leads to gangs forming and the discovery that some of the kids have developed strange powers adds to the layers of mistrust. All the while, the question of what has happened and why is pushed into the background while they wrestle with what will happen next.

Gone is the first of a series that portrays a dystopian life at the hands of those controlled by “the Darkness”. Sometimes graphic in its portrayal of violence, it is most suitable for those who can happily separate fiction from life is a wonderful first step into the literary world of action and horror. Described on the cover as a “Lord of the Flies for the 21st century”, Gone has its fair share of villains and heroes but space is given for those characters to be humanised and provides thought for the potential reasons as to how and why they may have developed as such and can still change for better or worse.