Wolf By Wolf, by Ryan Graudin

Yael’s story opens in 1944 on a death train, squashed in among five thousand others, no food, no water, for three days. She is six years old. But when she arrives at her destination she will be saved by Dr. Geyer – if you can call it that.

Cut to 1956. Germania, the capital of the Third Reich, where we learn not only that the Nazis won the war, but that Yael has what she calls the ability to skinshift: she can take on any face she chooses, change her appearance at will. And now she is going to use this skill to change the world.

Ryan Graudin sets the scene in the opening chapters of Wolf by Wolf absolutely perfectly: here is a young woman with a terrible past that we can guess at but only guess at, a young woman with an intriguing and unusual twist that makes you immediately engage with her and want to know more – more about what happened to her, and more about what is going to happen. Because Yael, working with the resistance, has been tasked to kill Hitler.

Every year, Germany and Japan hold The Axis Tour, an annual motorcycle race, a grueling, cross-country race for thousands of kilometers, from Germania (aka Berlin) to Tokyo. Only the best riders from Germany and Japan can enter, and only the best rider will win. But what a prize: accolade, yes, but also attendance at the winner’s ball and an audience with the Fuhrer himself, the only time he is ever seen in public these now. Yael’s task is take the place and the face of last year’s winner, Adele Woolfe; to be her, to race as her, and to win.

Wolf by Wolf is absolutely brilliant and massively enjoyable. It basically has everything, interweaving the trials and traumas of the bike race with flashbacks to Yael’s past, revealing the history behind both her special abilities and the five wolf tattoos racing down her arm. The race is not only physically trying but full of emotional and psychological challenges too, from the riders who will play as dirty as they can get to having to evade Adele’s brother Felix and his prying questions, and navigate the unknown history between Adele and fellow racer Luke. Everyone has something to hide and murky motivations and Yael has to make tough choice after tough choice throughout the race. Will she make it? Will she win? What will she lose or have to shed along the way?

It is no longer just about winning the race and doing what she has to do, Yael is also fighting herself and her past and Adele’s past all in one. The only thing that doesn’t change when she skinshifts are the wolf tattoos: they ground her and remind her who she is and what she’s fighting for. Because, if you don’t have your own face any more, what is your identity and how do you hold on to that?

I love the cover of Wolf by Wolf with the overhead view of Yael on her motorbike, their combined shadow taking the form of a wolf. From the tattoos along Yael’s arm to the surname of her doppelganger, wolves are obviously a pretty clear theme through the story. Yael is riding with a pack of biting, arguing wolves in the Axis Tour, yet in some ways she is the wolf in sheep’s clothing, hiding in plain sight, hoping to get access to another wolf’s lair. She knows she should trust no-one, but sometimes that is easier said than done. Because in order to stay human, you have to love, and without trust, how can you love?

Wolf by Wolf is a smart, many-layered thriller that not only kept me right on the edge of my seat, but kept me guessing right up until the final, scary, and completely unexpected twist. An alternate history, a brutal race, a secret mission, with a pinch of sci-fi to set it going – hands down to Ryan Graudin for coming up with something so entirely different.

The Big Lie, by Julie Mayhew

Jessika Keller is a good girl. She knows she is; it’s her duty, after all: to be faithful, to be pure, to be German. She is German and she is British, but it is really only the German part that matters. It is 2014 and she is the 16/17-year-old daughter of a high-ranking official of the Greater German Reich. She is going to be a champion ice skater and her best friend is Clementine Hart.

Correction. Her best friend was Clementine Hart.

The title of this book, The Big Lie, references an expression coined by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf: it is much easier to convince the masses of a big lie than of a small one. Julie Mayhew’s use of the term for the title of her novel seems to allude to the big lie that her fast-forwarded version of the Nazi regime has created: Jessika’s world is one where they are told that they are the best of the best and everyone else, everyone who isn’t pure or doesn’t conform to the ‘government framework’ is untermensch – inferior.

It’s a tough world for us to imagine: no individuality, no freedom of expression. But for Jessika it is everything she knows. That is, until she begins to have feelings that she has no compass for, and until Clementine begins to say things and do things that make no sense to Jessika. Gradually Jess is forced to consider that perhaps there are alternatives to what she knows. We know from the start of The Big Lie that something has changed for Jessika, and as she reveals her story in flashback we discover that there are all sorts of lies – big and small – that being good is not always straightforward, and perhaps the worst thing of all is the lie of omission.

Julie Mayhew has constructed her story really well, from the way she leads us to question why exactly Jess’s father ‘tipped Herr Hart off’ about the house next door being available, how Jessika believes she is helping her friend whilst actually informing on her, and how the Greater German Reich engineers a visit from a US pop star in a way that turns him from being exciting and forbidden to a disappointment. Jessika is an unreliable narrator – she tells us what she chooses to tell us, leading us in one direction, and then revealing that actually there was a whole other part that she left out. How much more has she omitted to tell us? There are all sorts of interesting parallels here between this technique of story telling and the way that the Greater German Reich has indoctrinated her and the rest of the German/British population.

‘Alternate History’ novels and the question of ‘what if the Nazis won the war?’ are certainly not new, but one of the really interesting things about them is that there are so many directions to take – there are basically endless possibilities and endless stories that could be told using this technique. The Big Lie takes a fairly straightforward approach to its tale, but this is nonetheless very effective. I did feel there were maybe one or two questionable plot turns – how does Frau Keller find out about Jess’s dalliance with GG and, after the explosive events of the concert (which bring everything to a head for Jessika), why do they choose to act against Jessika at the strange point in time that they ultimately choose? But these are little things, and perhaps feed into both the bigger atmosphere of ‘big brother is watching you’ and Jess’s semi-unreliable narrative.

There is another really excellent new YA Nazi alternate history book out this autumn, Wolf By Wolf by Ryan Graudin, but it could not be more different to The Big Lie. What I think Julie Mayhew’s novel made me think more of is another novel altogether: Seed by Lisa Heathfield. Seed is the story of Pearl, who grows up in a small community/cult, and I can see a lot of similarities between Pearl’s indoctrination in her community’s rituals and beliefs and Jessika’s – they are simply performed on a different scale.

How many lies has Jessika been told? Perhaps we’ll never know, but as she becomes an expert on zwischenraum – the space in between, like twilight – it certainly gets the reader thinking. She is stuck in this space in between: neither good nor bad, neither liar nor truth teller, neither child nor adult; never quite free. Thank goodness the Nazis did not win the war – but, nevertheless, there are still plenty of places around the world, big and small, where children and adults are conditioned. It is probably even happening on your own doorstep, albeit hopefully to a lesser extreme: what do you believe in that isn’t true? As Mayhew said in an online interview about the book, “We all get subtle messages about race, class and gender as we grow up - messages that often need to be challenged.”