The home corner - Ruth Thomas

Nineteen-year-old Luisa McKenzie has failed her Scottish Highers and finds herself back at primary school - working as a teaching assistant, a role she never envisaged or wanted. Her old friends have all left town and she spends her days perched in the classroom's Home Corner, answering questions about God and Death and the colour of the sky.

Increasingly disillusioned and reflecting on paths not taken, Luisa begins to ask her own questions about life and the so-called adult world. As her end-of-year review looms, it looks like she may not even be able to hold down this unsatisfactory job much longer and, with the discovery of an uncomfortable secret, her take on reality slowly begins to unravel . . .

The Home Corner is a funny, tender novel about feeling adrift when facing the 'real world' for the first time. It explores the way we create our own identities in the light of other people's, and queries the distinctions that are made between the absent and the present, the real and the imagined.