You’re my best friend, Shmuel,’ he said. ‘My best friend for life.

Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?’ I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. ‘What irony?’ I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. ‘That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.

There is cruelty in the world Eliza, you can see that, can't you? It surrounds us. It breathes on us. We spend our life trying to escape it.

But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.

Well you've been brought here against your will, just like I have. If you ask me, we're all in the same boat. And it's leaking.

I think i'm just breathing, that's all. And there's a difference between breathing and being alive.

I think that books for young people should have serious and important themes, they shouldn't be trivial. So the books I write, they would be the kind of stories you would write in an adult novel only they just happen to feature a child at the center of them.