It all begins with a challenge. Morgan sneers at Ditto for getting everything he knows out of books - even sex - and challenges him to prove that literature is ever related to real life. Ditto takes up the challenge. During half term holiday he writes down what happens to him.

And a great deal does. First his father has a heart attack, brought on, Ditto believes, by an explosive row between them. Ditto goes off to the country, is befriended by two strangers, drawn into a drunken brawl, and then, astonished at his own daring, helps to burgle a house.

But the secret, and purpose, of Ditto's journey is a meeting with a girl, Helen - the girl of his imagining - who helps him make the leap from what he has only read about into real, life-changing experience. True? Or 'just a story'? Was it only a game played with words? The answers, Ditto says, are all there in his book for anyone who accepts his challenge to look for them.

'Like many other good novels, it is partly about writing and the nature of fiction, and that makes it first-class reading for anyone who has ever thought seriously about literature. Above all, it's very funny.' Margaret Meek in School Librarian.

First published by Bodley Head 1978

Definitions paperback (with Dance on My Grave), January 2007,

ISBN 978-1-862-30288-4, £6.99

All contents are ©Aidan Chambers unless otherwise stated.