Cameron’s mum gave me book tokens for Christmas so I could buy books without Cameron shouting at me (she gets me), so I took myself on a trip to WH Smiths and Waterstones and came back with a few books, including this one.

The description on the back was reminiscent of Room by Emma Donoghue, a book I read in 2012 and absolutely loved. And the cover itself is beautiful, which always helps.

Peggy is eight years old when her father takens her to live in a cabin in a remote Euorpean forest. There, he tells her that her mother and the rest of the world are gone.

The book is set simultaneously in 1976 onwards, where Peggy has been taken to Die Hutte with her father and is living as ‘the last surviving people on the planet’, and also in 1985, where Peggy has made it home and is coming to terms with being back in her real life. I thought that knowing straight away that Peggy would make it home would spoil the suspense of the story, but it didn’t, if anything, everything that happened had you on tenterhooks as you wondered ‘is this it, is this when she escapes?’.

The plot and the characters reel you in with an intensity I’ve not had in a while, leaving me unable to put the book down and stop reading. It flowed so well that I didn’t even feel like I was turning pages, I was so absorbed in the book that I might as well have been inside the pages themselves. I was so taken with Peggy’s character that it was almost as if her life was entwined with mine, and there were times while I was reading that I couldn’t breathe.

The ending of the book (contrary to what you might think) actually threw up a few surprises, including a couple of moments where I actually gasped with shock at the scene that was playing out in front of me, and it made me want to flick back to the beginning and start again to see what I may have missed.

A beautiful start to 2016, absolutely fantastic.