MEG ROSOFF’s Almost Nothing Happened is a funny and fast-paced summer read.

Read on for an extract…

ABOUT THE BOOK

Paris. August. One long summer of nothing. 48 hours of everything. From the inimitable Meg Rosoff comes a chaotic and irresistible new YA.

Seventeen-year-old Callum is facing an unfortunate truth: his summer exchange in rural France was a failure. No epic adventure, no summer fling, and his French is still rubbish. Just as he should be boarding the Eurostar home, without even a hint of a plan, Callum impulsively decides to stay (and doesn’t bother telling his parents).

He only knows one person in Paris: his long-lost cousin, Harrison, an oboist. As night falls on the hottest weekend of the year, an adventure begins – involving a motorbike, a curfew, a stolen oboe, a priceless Matisse painting, at least one police chase, a climate protest and the enigmatic, alluring, irresistible Lilou …

A completely delicious, funny, fast-paced summer read from the multi-award-winning author of How I Live Now, The Great Godden and Friends Like These.

EXTRACT

2

I didn’t have the time of my life on my French exchange. I didn’t learn fluent French. I didn’t develop a passion for French culture or cuisine. I didn’t make lifelong friends. I didn’t lose my virginity.

What did I do? I worried. Sulked. Fell in love with a girl who cared nothing for me. Avoided human contact, pretended to be bored. Took interminable walks with the family dog – a small hairy mutt who liked me about half as much as I liked him.

It was not my finest hour. Not that I blamed France.

It all started with me asking the best student in class to write an introductory letter to my French family. Mediocre language skills had made my own letter indéchiffrable. Indecipherable.

This was, of course, cheating, but it did teach me a valuable life lesson, one you might want to take on board for your own future: faking a foreign language is not sustainable over time.

The photo I enclosed with the (outsourced) letter captured my best angle and unaccountably made me look almost cool, when in real life I was anything but. And compared to Florian and Élodie (my glamorous teen counterparts), I was about as glamorous as a chip butty.

They greeted me with a gentle torrent of French, the usual sort of ‘Hello, how are you, we’re so pleased to meet you, we hope your trip was pleasant’, etc. etc., and I greeted them back with a few stumbled phrases that I tried to imbue with gratitude and goodwill. But it felt as if I’d been struck by lightning and somehow couldn’t remember even basic Year 7 French, the ‘Bonjour Madame Thibault, bonjour Monsieur Thibault’ level that guaranteed you’d be able to ask with confidence if the croissant was gluten-free.

I did my best to keep up my side of the relationship, but had to admit I knew nothing about jazz, with which Florian and Élodie were obsessed, or sex (ditto), or French literature or politics. Their tiny town in south-west France hosted a world-famous early music festival every year, and much time was spent discussing the virtues of Monteverdi vs Handel; at least, that’s what I think they were discussing, it was hard to tell. Another conversational blind spot. Once the dynamic settled, I tried to make myself invisible – hanging back with a book until everyone had gone out and then having breakfast by myself in an empty apartment and slithering out avec le chien, Titou, for a walk in the quiet countryside. I simply didn’t have the confidence to speak French and try to improve, which kind of defeated the whole exercise.

Don’t roll your eyes, I couldn’t help it. Maybe you don’t remember a time when you barely had the confidence to ask where the toilet was. Maybe you were never that insecure. If so, congratulations. I envy you still.

I tried being easy to have around. I worked really hard at it. What is it that people want to feel when they meet you? Does he laugh at my jokes? Is he sympathique? Sparky? What team does he support? But in the case of me in France, I didn’t speak, so how would they know?

During the first week, the beautiful Élodie invited me to a picnic at some gloriously handsome young man’s grand home where a select group of beautiful, educated young French people talked (too fast and in incomprehensible slang) about – presumably – cinema, politics, music, literature and sex, while I gazed off into space trying desperately to look as if I might be thinking about something amusing. It was agony.

Titou was a pretty good companion, once I got my head around the fact that not all dogs spoke English. He had a passion for hunting rats along the edge of the vineyards where the grapes were just starting to ripen. This made our walks a lot more interesting. I learned to shout ‘Viens ici!’ when he strayed too far away and ‘Laisse!’ when he showed signs of eating the rat he’d caught. Sometimes his battle with a rodent lasted longer than I was strictly happy to watch, sometimes the squeaking was awful to listen to, and usually I found myself sympathising with the rat. My French family clearly thought Titou and I were intellectually compatible, though I’m pretty sure he was smarter.

Luckily, I’d brought along Crime and Punishment, because Moe said it was a laugh, which, strictly speaking, it wasn’t, though even I had to acknowledge that Raskolnikov’s existence was marginally worse than mine, which helped. Particularly once he was sentenced to eight years hard labour in Siberia.

On the first day, dinner was a stilted affair of everyone talking around and over me, me entirely failing to get the hang of sophisticated phrases like ‘Please pass the butter’, and the specified goal of strengthening international relationships falling very flat. What, in short, is more boring than a charmless foreigner, too nervous to take the risk of speaking, plonked into a middle-class family whose earnest politesse barely conceals the wish that he wasn’t there?

In short? Nothing.

3

For breakfast, my French family ate pieces of a flat dinner-plate shaped cake they referred to merely as ‘galette’. It tasted mainly of butter, and though indescribably delicious on the day it was bought (fresh and slightly bendy), it tasted better and better as days passed and it turned stale.

Galette was just about my favourite thing about France. Obviously, I loved Élodie, but I didn’t feel the same futile desperation to make a good impression on galette. On my last day, I walked down to the bakery and bought two to take home, each beautifully wrapped in cellophane and tied with a small piece of striped ribbon. I didn’t love all French specialities – horse burgers caused unease – but I did appreciate the way they packaged patisserie: printed papers, white boxes, ribbon, like everything you ate was a gift.

At least I’ll have emergency sustenance for the day, I thought, having abandoned my seat on Eurostar and set off for my unknown future in Paris without fully considering that I was fatally short of money for luxuries like food, transport and shelter. I had no money, in fact, except a few coins and an emergency credit card for use in emergencies only, which had been impressed upon me so often and at such length that I hadn’t dared touch it all summer.

I considered declaring an emergency, but it wasn’t even one thirty. Maybe I’d wait till five.

I did have an ace in the hole, namely my cousin Harrison, who’d been studying music in France for the past seven years and whose details I had on my phone just in case I needed a matching kidney donor over the summer.

He would of course love to see me (so I’d been told), even though he probably had no idea who I was, not having laid eyes on me since I was four. I didn’t think I’d recognise him at all. We didn’t spend a lot of time with his side of the family, as we lived south of the Thames and they lived in Sheffield.

I turned my phone on, shot a text off to Harrison telling him I was unexpectedly coming to visit. Wouldn’t he be surprised when I showed up at his door! Wouldn’t I be surprised if he was right now playing a concert tour in Amsterdam or Egypt?

I could hear Moe’s words murmuring gently in the ether all around me.

‘Destiny will guide your feet.’

‘The journey is the destination.’

‘The path to wisdom begins with a single step.’ And so on and bloody on.

Conserving battery, I shut my phone off again. Also, the number of people I didn’t want to talk to kept growing.

Harrison lived near Bastille, a 45-minute walk from Gare du Nord according to Maps, so I set off. It was hot. Pretty much unbearably hot. Visible waves of heat rose from the pavements. The streets of Paris seemed quiet for such a big city, even the cafés were deserted. It was too hot to sit outside, too hot to drink coffee. Too hot, even, to drink citron pressé or eat a croque monsieur under an umbrella. In what everyone said was the worst heatwave since the ice age, anyplace that wasn’t air-conditioned wasn’t possible.

The long walk should have been an opportunity to immerse myself in the world’s most graceful city, the quaint streets and elegant shops, the stylish denizens, their beautiful children and coiffured pets. But the streets were empty, and with no water supply, I couldn’t contemplate anything except how thirsty I was. The breeze, such as it was, blew hot as a dragon’s breath and was worse than no breeze at all. And yet, something about bolting had eased my feelings of panic, despite a vague sense that what I’d done was rash and completely fantastical; after all, there was no evidence that we were moving to Dubai except that my father worked for an oil company and often travelled to that part of the world. My parents had been arguing about it a lot this year, Mum shouting, ‘Why don’t you quit?’ and Dad answering, ‘Who do you think pays for this lifestyle?’

In our house, the climate crisis was personal. ‘This lifestyle’ was funded by Dad and my GP mother, in a determinedly middle-class suburb of South London with decent local schools, and the occasional holiday somewhere like Scotland or Devon. My two siblings and I never had to choose between shoes and food. We knew we were lucky because everyone told us all the time.

About a year ago, my father had been offered a job in Dubai and laughed it off, saying, ‘I’m not quite that desperate yet.’

But maybe he was now? Maybe inflation had increased the cost of our lifestyle and he was doing it for us? I had no real idea how lifestyles worked.

Walking and sweating, sweating and walking, the heat weighed me down so much that I stopped at a large public bin, opened my backpack and jettisoned everything I could live without. Socks, sweatshirt, books, shampoo … amazing what seemed unnecessary when you had to carry it in a heatwave.

Eventually I found Harrison’s street, the house number and flat number, and pressed the buzzer. Waited. Buzzed again.

No answer.

There was nothing to do but sit on a step opposite, in the shade, where I could observe without being mistaken for a runaway summer exchange student. People came and people went, and none looked remotely like my cousin Harrison, or what I vaguely imagined he should look like.

Just before four, I buzzed again, in case Harrison had moved and I had to beg whoever had recently rented his flat to let me sleep on the sofa for a night or two.

I had no plan B.

But miracle of miracles, a disembodied crackly voice called, ‘Allo, bonjour? Allo? C’est qui?’

‘Harrison?’

‘Oui? Yes? Callum?’

‘Oh, thank goodness you’re there. Please can I come up? I’m in kind of a predicament.’

The door buzzed and I trudged to the third floor with wet armpits and a pounding heart, hoping a number of diverse hopes, mainly that Harrison had a strong belief in the value of family ties.

He peered at me as I came through the door and I peered back.

‘Harrison?’

‘Callum?’

‘Yes, hello, thank you for answering the door.’

‘Well, hello. I got your text. To be honest, I didn’t really expect you to visit, though your mum told my mum you might. Come in.’

I shrugged off my near-empty backpack and placed it in the corner so he wouldn’t trip over it. The flat was tiny.

‘Sit down. Can I get you a cold drink?’ Harrison seemed tense.

‘Just a glass of water please.’ Make that a bucket with ice. It was fiendishly hot in his flat. ‘I’m sorry just to show up, did I interrupt something? Do you have to be somewhere?’

‘It’s fine,’ he called from the rabbit-hutch-sized kitchen. ‘I was just practising. There’s a lot happening today. You didn’t buzz before, did you? I never hear the bell when I’m making a racket.’

I shook my head and accepted the water. ‘You play the clarinet?’ I could see an instrument lying across a chair but didn’t quite recognise it.

‘Oboe.’

‘Oboe,’ I echoed. Of course.

‘You’ve been on a French exchange?’ When I nodded, he asked, ‘How was it?’

‘Awful. My fault not theirs. They were nice and gorgeous and polite, but my French was terrible and they thought I was a moron.’

‘But … you improved over the summer? Isn’t that sort of the point?’

If only he knew. ‘Not really. I got off to a terrible start and never recovered.’

I could have told Harrison that within 10 minutes of arriving at my new French home, I’d encountered a foot-long poo floating in the toilet, which pretty much set the tone for the rest of the summer. But I didn’t. Anyway, strictly speaking that wasn’t the bad start, that was just an amuse-bouche for what was to come.

‘Ah well.’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘The French can be superior bastards, I mostly hate them. Wait, that’s not true, I really like some of them. My girlfriend’s French. She’s incredibly superior, which is why I like her. Liked her. She’s my ex-girlfriend now. Probably nothing to do with being French.’ He sighed. ‘It’s hard to generalise about 67 million people. Come to think of it, I mostly hate the English too.’

I agreed that it was hard to generalise and though I wouldn’t go so far as hating all 67 million British, there were definitely a fair few I could do without. And actually, I’d been incredibly partial to one or two French people over the summer. One, in fact. But more of that later.

‘Hello?’

Harrison was staring at me.

‘Sorry. So, I guess you’re dying to know what I’m doing here.’

Harrison frowned. ‘Not really. You had a spare half-hour after visiting the Louvre?’

‘I’m supposed to be on a Eurostar back to London,’ I said. ‘I did a runner.’

‘A runner?’ He blinked. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ I realised now that I didn’t. ‘I had three suspicious phone calls in a row from my father, and I have pretty good instincts for bad news, which I felt certain this was, and it brought on a panic attack, and I couldn’t breathe, and the thought of being on a train seemed impossible under the circumstances, so in the end I just … didn’t go.’

‘What was the news?’

‘What news?’

‘What was the bad news your dad was phoning to tell you?’

Oh. ‘I don’t know. I turned my phone off.’

‘Wow,’ Harrison said. ‘That’s quite …’

‘Conflict averse? I know. Everyone says I need to get hold of myself. Face up to life.’ I shrugged. ‘Look, I don’t suppose you’d let me crash here for a couple of nights?’

Harrison shifted uncomfortably. ‘Oh God, no, it’s really not … I mean, no, probably not … In short, no.’

‘I swear to God I won’t cramp your style and I’m perfectly happy sleeping on the floor and I’ll get my own food, and if your ex-girlfriend comes back I’ll just go out and walk around the neighbourhood. I normally wouldn’t ask but as you can see, it’s kind of an emergency and I don’t know anyone else in Paris.’

‘Couldn’t you go home? Won’t your parents be frantic? Have you told them where you are?’

I hadn’t. And let’s face it, I couldn’t. Not just yet. ‘Kind of,’ I said, hoping he’d be too polite to ask what that meant.

‘Look, Callum, I’m sure you’re perfectly harmless, but I have a concert tonight and a rehearsal in half an hour and I don’t like other people very much and it’s hot – your timing isn’t exactly – how can I put this nicely—’

‘Could I come?’ ‘To the rehearsal?’ ‘The concert.’

He frowned again. ‘You’re interested in classical music?’

No. ‘Very much so,’ I said. ‘I’d really like to hear you play. And if I can just stay for a couple of days, I’ll leave you in peace and you’ll never have to see me again.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want ever to have to see you again.’ Being cornered was affecting his grammar. ‘It’s just not the best, not the most convenient …’ He sighed, deeply. ‘OK, fine. But only two nights. You can sleep on the couch. I have to go now; I’ll text you the address and leave a ticket at the box office.’ He looked at me with an air of resignation. ‘Can you stay out of trouble please and not go through my stuff?’

I nodded.

‘And if your parents call, asking whether I’ve had any contact and do I know if you’ve been kidnapped and murdered?’

I fidgeted. ‘Could you possibly not answer their calls for a day or two – so you don’t have to lie?’

‘Please tell me you have a plan.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I lied. ‘I don’t have the money to live in Paris for the rest of my life and, as I might have mentioned, my French isn’t up to much.’

I smiled a sad little smile that said I was incredibly grateful to him for indulging me and my panic attack and my bad French and my certainty that my dad had been calling with news about my future in Dubai. It also communicated that he wouldn’t get done for abduction, probably just for harbouring a runaway teen, which carried a much shorter jail sentence.

Harrison smiled back, in the most half-hearted way imaginable, a way that said he wished I hadn’t come into his life at all, but particularly not tonight, and he hoped I would soon be gone and not his responsibility, and though he supposed he’d have to be friendly if we ever met again, it wouldn’t be a meeting he hoped would take place any time soon.

‘Thank you, Harrison, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Go to your rehearsal. I’ll be fine here and come home with you after the concert, so you don’t even need to leave a key.’

So off he set with his oboe packed away in a chestnut leather case, looking dubious in the extreme (Harrison, not the oboe) and texting me the address of the concert hall (‘It’s not far, you can walk’). I thanked him again for saving my life, and when he left, I sat down on the couch, relieved and sweating and thankful to know what the next 24 hours looked like.

I breathed a sigh of relief worthy of a man with a temporary stay of execution.

ABOUT THE ATUHOR

Meg Rosoff is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and winner of the Carnegie Medal, the Printz Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis and the coveted Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She grew up in a suburb of Boston and moved to London, where she worked in advertising for 15 years before writing her first novel, How I Live Now, which has sold more than one million copies in 36 territories. She has written critically acclaimed and award-bedecked books for adults, teenagers and younger readers. Almost Nothing Happened follows The Great Godden and Friends Like These, three coming-of-age novels which share a summer theme. Meg lives in London and spends her summers on the Suffolk coast.

Visit Meg Rosoff’s website