The Dynamite Room - Softcover

'Superb. Absorbing, suspenseful and with a beautifully poetic touch' --Nathan Filer, author of the Costa Book of the Year 2013, The Shock of the Fall

'An effective psychological drama between two extraordinary characters. Claustrophobic, touching, character-driven and told in lovely prose...Readers who loved The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas will have a strong affinity with The Dynamite Room' --Katie Ward, author of Girl Reading

'Clever and unsettling, this most unconventional of war stories had me totally gripped' --Shelley Harris, author of Jubilee

'Deeply thought provoking... Claustrophobic, tense and thoughtful' --The Lady

'Suspenseful and powerful. A novel of great humanity that exposes the absurd contradictions of war' --Samantha Harvey, author of The Wilderness

'Ambitious and often gripping...Hewitt has a strong sense of narrative pace and brings a strange poetry to his depiction of an exhausted and empty world... tense and dramatic' --Observer

'With its unshowy, confident prose, this novel is accomplished, resonant and surprising, and poses some delicately handled questions about whether redemption is possible' -- --Guardian

A Suffolk schoolgirl's world is turned upside-down by the arrival of a Nazi agent in Jason Hewitt's tense and pacy debut... Ambitious and often gripping.. Hewitt has a strong sense of narrative pace and brings a strange poetry to his depiction of an exhausted and empty world...A tense and dramatic climax a fitting end to a very promising first novel.
Observer

With its unshowy, confident prose, this novel is accomplished, resonant and surprising, and poses some delicately handled questions about whether redemption is possible, and at what point a good heart becomes forever besmirched
Guardian

Whilst this nuanced mystery is obviously fictional, Hewitt s research enriches a claustrophobic and formidable first novel that builds to a devastating climax
Metro

Debut Novelists to Watch Out For.. Summer, 1940. Lydia is 11, an evacuee in a gas mask, trudging alone up a deserted main road. Heiden is a German officer, washed up on the Suffolk Coast. Hidden in a boarded up house, the soldier keeps the girl hostage, their two stories slowly emerging in tandem as the bond between them grows. There are no happy endings with this book. But, as Hewitt movingly evokes, both are lost, just trying to find their way home
Harpers Bazaar

Book of the Week....Two characters are brought together in the circumstance of war in this compelling and descriptive novel.. What I loved about this book was the descriptive narrative. You really feel like you are there, shut up in the house with both of them. The temperament of the two characters is excellently conveyed in simple actions. The deserted house is beautifully described; brought to life by the girl s memories of what was there before her father s vegetable patch now dry and unyielding, the wardrobe that held her mother s clothes lying empty.
We Love This Book

Deeply thought provoking.. Hewitt superbly conveys the contrasting elements of tension and friendship in the relationship between captor and captive between a vulnerable child and an adult in a position of power. Claustrophobic, tense and thoughtful.' --The Lady

July 1940. Eleven-year-old Lydia walks through a village in rural Suffolk on a baking hot day. She is wearing a gas mask. The shops and houses are empty, windows boarded up and sandbags green with mildew, the village seemingly deserted. Leaving it behind, she strikes off down a country lane through the salt marshes to a large Edwardian house -- the house she grew up in. Lydia finds it empty too, the windows covered in black-out blinds. Her family is gone. Late that night he comes, a soldier, gun in hand and heralding a full-blown German invasion. There are, he explains to her, certain rules she must now abide by. He won't hurt Lydia, but she cannot leave the house. Is he telling the truth? What is he looking for? Why is he so familiar? And how does he already know Lydia's name? Eerie, thrilling and piercingly sad,The Dynamite Room evokes the great tradition of war classics yet achieves a strikingly original and contemporary resonance. Hypnotically compelling, it explores, in the most extreme of circumstances, the bonds we share that make us human.