“Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, ‘You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp Green Lake.’ Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before.”

The winner of countless awards, Holes is a truly remarkable tale of fate, resilience and survival. Stanley Yelnats’s family has always had bad luck; the fault of a gypsy curse put on his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather. So when he’s found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to a boot camp in the sweltering desert, Stanley isn’t surprised. The evil warden of the camp (sinister in her poisoned red nail-polish and prowling snake-skin boots), claims that digging a hole each day is the way to turn a bad boy into a good boy. Every day, Stanley must toil in the blazing sun and dig his own hole. But is that all there is to it – or must Stanley dig up the truth? A marvellous work of magic realism which blends past and future, real-life and fairytale into one shimmering mirage-like plot, Holes is a truly precious book to which even the baddest boys are drawn. Written in a fresh, surreal voice and set amid a boiling desert landscape, this poignant, cinematic work is impossible to forget.