The Bunker Diary

The Bunker Diary is a young adult novel by Kevin Brooks, published in 2013. It won the Carnegie Medal in 2014 and afterwards became the subject of a public argument about violence and despair in books written for teenagers.

Linus Weems is sixteen when he wakes in a low-ceilinged building made entirely of whitewashed concrete, with six small rooms off a single corridor and no windows, doors or stairs. He has been kidnapped, and as the days pass five other people arrive, taken from different lives and different backgrounds without any explanation offered to any of them. Nobody knows who is holding them or what he wants. The novel is Linus's diary, recording the practical business of living in a sealed space, the way the group divides and then re-forms, and the slow realisation that the man behind it is interested in the effect rather than in negotiating for anything.

Brooks writes with no rescue narrative to soften the book, and the diary form means the reader knows only what Linus is able to observe from inside the bunker.