If this doesn't tug your heart strings, I don't know what will. Katya Balen delivers yet another tender and lyrically rich narrative that is bound to shine as bright as the nightjar itself.

Katya Balen writes the most exquisitely moving middle-grade novels. 'Nightjar' is a beautiful short coming-of-age novel in which nature helps to heal the fractured relationship between a boy and his father.

Noah, who lives with his mother, is fascinated by the natural world and particularly by the many different birds he sees around him. As he is preparing for Bar Mitzvah, his father returns home from his luxurious apartment in New York where he now lives with his new girlfriend. Noah's father is unimpressed by Noah's love of birds and wants him to grow out of it. When Noah discovers an injured nightjar, Noah wants to nurse it to recovery but his father thinks it would be better to let nature take its course. Noah is appalled by his father's attitude, but gradually both father and son come to understand each other better.

Katya Balen's writing is, as ever, stunning. She encourages us to share in Noah's wonder at the natural world, such as when he describes how the nightjar's "feathers are swirled with constellations. A map of its world is patterned onto its wings". She also weaves in other beautiful elements, for instance, Noah's family's Judaism, which we see in their sharing of challah and rugelach and in Noah practising his Torah reading (fittingly, the story of Noah sending birds out of the Ark) "like a spell until they take on new life and new meaning and I hear them in new ways". I also loved his mum's work as a dressmaker, making tiny gowns for babies that have tied which "hang like ghosts in our flat", as well Noah's Bar Mitzvah suit, "lined with flashes and scraps of silk so when my jacket flaps open it looks like the wings of a bird". As Noah says, "My mum can stitch together life and death and heartbreak and hope and beauty and the past and the future. She is brilliant." Above all, the novel is concerned with the theme of growing up, as Noah learns about "that funny strange space where people and things and actions can be wrong and right at the very same time".

This book is published by Barrington Stoke who specialise in producing books to engage reluctant and dyslexic readers. The books are designed to be high in interest and low in difficulty; 'Nightjar' definitely fulfils this brief - although the writing is gorgeously poetic, it should also be accessible to all children of older primary and younger secondary age. Additionally, Richard Johnson's expressive illustrations add immeasurably to the book's beauty. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this book to review!