The Liar Who Kept the Bees

About this book

In Hobb's Bridge, a sun-baked Wiltshire market town, the bees on the Back Lane allotments must be told the town's news, and the town holds together because they listen. Rook Achterberg, sixteen, quick-mouthed and entirely out for himself, has just been caught selling supermarket honey in hand-labelled jars as 'Raw Back Lane Wildflower'. His punishment is sixty hours of reparation at the very hives he robbed. Then, in the record heat of summer 2022, the bees start talking to him. They have chosen him as their Teller, and a Teller cannot lie to them. Forty-six summers earlier, in the great drought of 1976, fifteen-year-old Midge Pell kept the same hives and faced the same restless swarms. Now names are slipping, doors are sticking and the 47 bus won't stop. What did the last Teller do? Can a born liar learn to tell the truth before the bees leave for good?