A dozen children live in the Death House, infected with a mysterious illness that will kill them before they ever reach adulthood. There is no cure and no hope – just grey days and black nights, waiting for the end.
With a premise that bleak you’d be forgiven for giving Sarah Pinborough’s The Death House a miss – don’t. You’d be passing over one of my favourite books of the year: a book that spoke to the angry teenager in me and told him that everything might just work out okay.
Much like Toby, our narrator, my life was fine up until my mid-teens. Preoccupied with girls and trying to make friends, everything went to shit when I ended up homeless, and eventually in sheltered housing as a ward of the state. For me, this was a result of a gradual build-up of a dozen things; for Toby it comes out of the blue, a routine blood test coming back positive and ruining his life. For any child or young person, moving away from your family so young is devastating.
What Sarah Pinborough really nails in The Death House is the depression, despair, and sense of being forgotten, unwanted, and unloved that, from my own experience at least, comes with living in care. Toby starts the novel hopeless and withdrawn, unwilling and unable to engage with those around him. He has retreated into himself to avoid any more trauma, like many kids who lose their family life – developing a callous disregard for everyone, rather than opening up and risking getting hurt all over again. As adults, we learn that this is a lie, a false economy, a fool’s errand. It merely makes things work and closes you off from the help of those around you.
At its heart, The Death House is a love story. Not just a romantic love story, but one that explores the love that can blossom between friends in tight places. Toby is forced out of his withdrawal by the arrival of Clara, a girl who is in the exact same situation. 
Unlike Toby, she refuses to give in and continues to live her life with joy and wonder. There is a lesson there for all of us, no matter our circumstances.
The Death House is bleak yet beautiful, dark yet full of warmth, compassion, and understanding. Sarah Pinborough deserves all the acclaim and accolades that have been coming her way. Reading The Death House took me back to the worst years of my life, and stirred up a whole load of bad memories of things I hadn’t thought about in years. By the end, though, I felt redeemed: as if I had revisited my past and survived, laying to rest some of the demons that lurk there. I just wish that this book had been around for the seventeen-year-old me, as I know it would have made him feel a whole lot less alone.
