Philip Noble, the hero of The Dead Father’s Club, has the most idiosyncratic and authentic British kid voice I've come across since Adrian Mole. This is a very impressive book; it's being published outside the fantasy genre, but whatever you call it, it’s going to be one of the major fantasy novels of 2007; it's that good. And the author manages to drag Hamlet’s plot in an unexpected — but completely justified — direction at the end, just when all seems hopeless.