The H-Bomb Girl, for younger readers, is a time travel story calculated to appeal to the Doctor Who set.

Laura, 14, has moved to Liverpool with her mum, who is separating from Laura’s dad, who is in the RAF. It’s 1962. Liverpool is an interesting place, just coming out of the post-war austerity years, with a young and exciting music scene centred around a band called The Beatles.

Laura’s dad is paranoid about something, and there’s some strange bloke lodging with Laura and her mum, and one of Laura’s teachers is strange, too, looking at her funny and making gnomish comments. Across the Atlantic, the Cuban missile crisis is in full flow, and for a time it seems as if the world will end.

This story is a delight, full of great detail on British life in the early 60s, but also stuffed with anachronisms and strangeness, time-travel tricks and parallel worlds. As an adult you notice a few logical inconsistencies, but to give a younger reader a taste for modern science fiction it would be hard to do better.

I bought this for my daughter, following my appeal on the other blog for recommendations. I’d already spotted this on another web site, but hadn’t realised it was so recently published (Sept 2007). With a female protagonist of about the right age and a time-travel adventure, this hit the target (ten year old girl) perfectly: she raced through it and would like more of the same, she says.