When I Was Me

17-year-old Ella wakes up one morning to find her whole world has changed. Her separated parents are back together again, her best friend doesn’t know her – or want to know her - and she’s studying subjects at school she’s hopeless at. Everything’s different – right down to her hair and her clothes– but it isn’t. She’s still Ella; just a completely different Ella... and the only person in the world who thinks there’s anything strange about this.

There is an explanation for what’s going on - and it’s a pretty clever one I don’t want to spoil – but it’s not the secret to the book’s success. What makes it such a gripping story, such a page-turner, is the way Ella, and everyone around her, is so vividly brought to life. Yes, we want to know why everything’s changed, yet the more the story progresses the less important the mystery becomes.

Because as we learn more and more about her lives, we wonder which of the two is the better. Is it the old one where she met wild Deeta, sneaking vodka into a teenage party; or the new one, where the less adventurous Rachel and Jen are genuinely hurt and puzzled by their best friend’s weird behaviour? Is it better to have parents still together but always bickering, or see them separated and Dad living with a younger woman Ella loathes? (The book’s most affecting moment: in the new world, Ella meets that same younger woman, stood up on a date in cafe – by Ella’s father? – and sees how lost and vulnerable an individual she is.) And is the old laddish Billy a better boyfriend than the new, more attentive Will?

When I Was Me is less a sci-fi mystery than a character study. It's a look at the way the most - seemingly – insignificant choices can change our lives and lead us down paths we never expected or imagined. And then it asks whether one path is better than another. Whether one life is better than another. It’s a book about what it is to be alive.

And it’s superb.