Critics' choice

The Knife That Killed Me

by Anthony McGowan

Definitions. Price £5.99. Age 12+

The knife that killed Paul, we learn in the compelling opening chapter of this powerful novel, was just an ordinary cheap kitchen knife from Woolworth's, an unwelcome pledge of unsought comradeship from a classroom tyrant. But in accepting it, Paul begins the inexorable countdown to his own end.

Telling his commanding first-person narrative from the vantage point of a cold, grey Sartre-esque afterlife, he portrays himself as an ordinary teenager at a rundown comprehensive. Intelligent but uninspired by schoolwork or by his contemporaries, Paul is an outsider, attracted to the individuality of the stigmatised "freaks" but neither brave nor lonely enough to join them.

His story traces the sequence of small but irrevocable steps in the relentless spiralling of events that leads from being picked on in an otherwise unexceptional geography lesson, through increasingly troubled exchanges with his peers, to his chilling death in a bloody battle between rival gangs.

An everyman figure who eloquently portrays the myriad unwritten codes of school life and gang warfare, Paul's narrative is poignant without being slushy, thought-provoking without descending into didacticism. Combining brief flashes of ironic humour with the unstoppable momentum of unfolding tragedy, this sadly timely book offers a cogent reminder of the far-reaching consequences of knife-violence.