Small Spaces - Katherine Arden, Penguin Random House Children's UK

‘Don't panic. That's the first rule of survival. Never panic.’Simple enough – until your school trip turns into a waking nightmare.After rescuing a book from the river, eleven-year-old Ollie discovers an unsettling ghost story about the sinister Smiling Man, a fiendish trickster who’ll grant any wish – for a price. Creepy, but it’s just a story …But when Ollie finds graves bearing the characters’ names on a school trip to a farm, that story begins to feel terrifyingly real. And then the bus breaks down on the way home.And darkness starts to fall. And the scarecrows are watching. But it’s the bus driver who sends Ollie and her friends, Coco and Brian, scrambling into the woods: ‘Best get moving,’ he said, ominously.‘At nightfall they’ll come for the rest of you.’As they work to unravel a hundred-year-old mystery and save their classmates from the Smiling Man, they’ll need quick thinking and even quicker feet if they’re going to survive. Full of slow-burning tension, gorgeously atmospheric writing and fantastically realised characters, this is quality-commercial fiction at its best: brilliant storytelling that feels accessible both in execution and packaging.