The Line They Drew Through Us offers a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful story of the lives of three children caught up in India's partition. Hiba Noor Khan spends the first half of the novel showing us a cohesive and close-knit community in a village near Lahore where those of different religions live harmoniously together, before showing how they are all effected by the violence stoked up by the British 'divide and rule' policy as independence and partition loom closer.
Khan doesn't sanitise the horrors of this mob violence, and at times this is almost unbearably sad to read, but the courage and compassion shown by both children and adults in this novel offers us hope. This is a powerful and important children's novel which will be popular with confident readers in upper kS2 as well as KS3. Many thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

Hiba Noor Khan has such a wonderful way with her writing that will pull the heart of anyone from age 8 to 80. Powerful, emotive, perfection.