Postcards from No Man's Land

Seventeen-year-old Jacob Todd travels from England to the Netherlands to take part in a ceremony honoring the grandfather he never knew, a soldier who fought in the 1944 battle near Oosterbeek. When he is robbed on his first day in Amsterdam, he ends up staying with Daan, a frank and freethinking young Dutchman, and soon finds his ideas about love, friendship and himself challenged. Alternating with Jacob's story is the voice of Geertrui, Daan's grandmother, who knew Jacob's grandfather during the war and now wants to tell the story of what happened between them. Aidan Chambers moves between the wartime past and the present day, letting each story shed light on the other. The novel won the Michael L. Printz Award.