All the Way Down

by Stewart Foster

A life-affirming story about friendship, adventure and self-belief, from the award-winning author of The Bubble Boy . Perfect for fans of Louis Sachar’s Holes and Elle McNicoll’s A Kind of Spark.

When three eleven-year-old ‘problem children’ are thrown together at summer camp, they’re challenged to build a place to live together for the next week. But after a trip to a disused tin-mine goes awry, Milo and his new friends, Oscar and Effie, soon find themselves split off from the group and trapped underground. Can they work through their individual issues and come together as a team to find their way to freedom?

Audible Audio

Published July 6, 2023

About the author

Stewart Foster lives in Bath and wishes he'd never left school. So he went back to university far too many years later and he wrote a book, We used to be Kings, and then he wrote another, The Bubble Boy, that was loved by The Guardian and many others. It won Sainsbury's book of the year 2016 (10+) and The Trinity Schools Book Award 2017 and many other library awards

'All the things that could go Wrong" has also won many school and library awards, and continues to be shortlisted.

His next novel will be published in May 2019



Like his page on Facebook - Stewart Foster Author and follow him on twitter @stewfoster1.

Reviews

[Nadine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 kids dealing with “stuff” list in a collapsed mine shaft.
Some nice dialogue and literary devices of 2 alternate time frames. Suitable for middle school

[Kitchen Sink Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the summer which for Milo, Oscar and Effie means Summer Camp but their experience is not one that many of us might want to replicate. They are about to face a challenge that leads to a proper press conference and plenty of questions but that is getting ahead of ourselves even though it is how the book opens. I do quite like it when a book opens in the present but then whisks us back into the past, in this case, eight weeks before. It sparks our curiosity for we are given an inkling of what might have happened but we are then led back to learn the full story for ourselves.

Stewart Foster’s All the Way Down is a brilliant middle-grade book but it may not be for the fainthearted after Milo and his two friends find themselves trapped underground in a disused mine. At least, with the story opening in the present, we know they are all alright! Milo spends a lot of time in his own head so, with the idea of helping him to ‘open up’, he is sent to a summer camp for ‘problem children.’ Milo is thrown into a project to build a place to live for the week with new friends Ollie and Effie. When a trip to a disused tin mine goes awry and the three find themselves trapped underground, separated from the rest of their group, they need to learn how to rely on one another and themselves, to stay safe whilst they wait for help to arrive. A brilliant, life-affirming story.