Hostage Three
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Overview
From the author of the Michael L. Printz award–winning novel In Darkness comes a critically-acclaimed, fast-paced thriller that’s as dangerous as the seas on which it’s set.
The last thing Amy planned to do this summer was sail around the world trapped on a yacht with her father and her stepmother. Really, all she wanted was to fast-forward to October when she’ll turn
eighteen and take control of her own life.
Aboard the Daisy May, Amy spends time sunbathing, dolphin watching and forgetting the past as everything floats by . . . until one day in the Gulf of Aden another boat appears. A boat with guns and pirates – the kind that kill.
Immediately, the pirates seize the boat and its human cargo. Hostage One is Amy’s father – the most valuable. Hostage Two: her stepmother. And Hostage Three is Amy, who can’t believe what’s happening. As the ransom brokering plays out, Amy finds herself becoming less afraid, and even
stranger still, drawn to one of her captors, a teenage boy who wants desperately to be more than who he has become. Suddenly it becomes brutally clear that the price of life and its value are two very different things . . .
A taut, emotionally loaded, devastatingly powerful thriller from the acclaimed, Printz award-winning author of In Darkness
A YA thriller with built-in explosives: Controversial, emotional, and utterly gripping--this has all the makings of a page-turner.
Packed with big contemporary talking points: Plot points focus on topics like banking, globalization, and piracy.
New offering from an exciting author: Nick’s first novel with us, In Darkness, earned starred reviews as well as praise from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. This new offering finds Nick at his best with the same high level of writing, but with a very commercial hook.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
* Perceptive and harrowing. . . . An inventive narrative construction . . . plays on the highly unstable situation of this utterly compelling read.
* Intelligent, empathetic, and eye-opening.
* Vivid and poignant. . . . The narrative twist is brilliant, taking readers on an emotional ride to the very last page.
[Lake] deftly paints the surreal and symbolic clash of worlds as Amy’s family and their Somali hijackers settle in for what becomes several weeks of ransom negotiations and maneuverings by the British Navy. . . Lake’s novel is a skillfully paced thriller that ends in heart-pounding tragedy, but the real achievement is the offshore glimpse it provides of a misunderstood, war-ravaged country.
* This double-helix-of-a-story explores the nature of freedom, humanity, survival and hope. A dark journey well worth taking-engrossing, disturbing, illuminating.
* A startling but successful feat of literary imagination. . . . Powerful and moving.
A likely eye-opener for teenage readers. . . . In Darkness works on multiple levels by blurring realities--telescoping across time, between dreams and waking, and . . . between the depiction of Haiti by the artist and Haiti itself. This is what makes the novel so gripping.
Remarkable. . . . Lake’s elegant, restrained prose and distinct characters will reward adults and older teenagers able to brave a story with strong language, harrowing scenes of brutality and an almost painful stab of joy at the end.
A bold storytelling move ripe for reader discussion. . . . Provocative, daring, and sure to be polarizing. Lake does not shy from the graphic depiction of life in past or present Haiti. . . . Such grittiness elevates his story above and beyond more typical historical fiction and gives the events an edge not found in classroom social studies lessons. . . . Readers are sure to have a hard time looking away.
Readers will climb aboard for the drama, but they may disembark with a better understanding of the grim reality of limited life choices in east Africa.
- Title: Hostage Three
- Author: Nick Lake
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781619631496, 9781619634381, 1619634384, 1619631490
- Resource ID: LLS:9781619631496
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:31:40Z
Nick Lake is the much-acclaimed author of In Darkness, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, and Hostage Three, which received three starred reviews and was named a Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Boston Globe Best Book of the Year. He is also the Publishing Director for fiction at HarperCollins Children's Books UK. Nick lives near Oxford, England. Visit him online at www.in-darkness.org and on Twitter at @nicklakeauthor.