A powerful, darkly comic YA novel about death, bullies, and the things love makes you do.

Gripping supernatural fantasy with real emotional guts–for fans of Patrick Ness, Frances Hardinge, and Philip Pullman.

She'd brought him a Curlywurly every visit, even when he couldn't eat. "For when you're better," she'd always say. It was always when, never if. Laurence Tipple's mum held his hand every day until the cancer finished what it started. Three squeezes. I love you. Four squeezes back. I love you too. Their code since he was seven.

Now Laurence is dead. Fifteen years old. No tunnel of light, no angels. Just a stopping, like when the telly cuts out and you're left staring at the blank screen.

His mum is falling apart. And grief like hers attracts things. Dark things with yellow eyes and skeletal hands that feed on pain and make it worse. She doesn't know they're there. She can't see what's coating her, getting thicker by the day.

Laurence can save her. One condition.

He has to save Maxwell Cope first.

Maxwell bloody Cope. Three years of shoves and whispers and calculated cruelty. Three years of walking into school with his stomach in knots. And now the afterlife wants Laurence to rescue the boy who made every single day a small war.

Cope's mum died of cancer too. His dad crawled inside a bottle and didn't come back out. The same darkness eating Claire alive has its hands round the Cope family's throat. Everything connected. Everything tangled together.

Saving one person means saving them all–bullies, drunks, grieving mothers. Laurence just has to figure out how, with a cat whose emotional range runs from contempt to deeper contempt, a spirit guide with absolutely no filter, and a Curlywurly wrapper that turns out to be the most important object in the afterlife.

Not a story about forgiving people who hurt you. A story about understanding them. The Adventures of Laurence Tipple because death doesn't get you out of anything, apparently.