In her award-winning historical fiction, Bernice Thurman Hunter evokes just what life felt like for her young characters in bygone eras. She winningly does it again in her latest book, The Runaway, set in post-Second World War London, England.

Eleven-year-old orphan Graham Robbertson lives in a group foster home run by the tough-minded but caring Mother Button. All Graham knows about his origins is that he was abandoned as a baby with his birth certificate pinned to his blanket. Over the years, he has built up an elaborate fantasy scenario about his birth mother that he replays in his mind so often it has become as real to him as the pungent vegetable water Mother Button forces the boys to drink to keep them healthy. His obsession with finding his mother is kick-started when Mother Button erroneously accuses him of “nicking” some food coupons. Graham blows up this minor squabble to the level of operatic tragedy, and runs off to London in the first of many searches for the mother he believes will give him all the love, understanding, and respect that he presumes only a birth mother can provide.

The novel gets off to a fast trot, just like the runaway boy. With deft, entertaining immediacy Hunter conveys Graham’s mixed bag of adventures and the people he meets. She convincingly renders Graham’s mumbo-jumbo of conflicting emotions and colourful narrative voice. Through Graham’s situation as an orphan, Hunter explores the essential questions of life and of literature – of finding one’s identity and making a home for oneself in the world.

Though the episodic plot is somewhat repetitious in structure, Hunter has a gift for capturing, with heartfelt sincerity, in resonant incidents throughout the novel, what really matters to children.