The Boy on Platform One — Victor Canning

A young London boy has a unique gift for the effortless memorizing of words. As his father, proprietor of a small shop selling secondhand books and antiques, uneasily uses Peter's gift for commercial gain, the apparatus of State Security steps in to exploit it for more sinister ends.

Competing pressures from the adult world create, unknowingly for Peter, a situation of mortal danger from which only luck and the resilience and sane instincts of a youth offer a possible line of escape.

Written by a master of the genre, this is a story of adventure and intrigue with a sharply contrasted background divided between the streets of Paddington and the tranquil countryside of Devon and Cornwall.

'Victor Canning is one of the world's finest story-tellers' Good Housekeeping