Kestrella Chu is a child of privilege being the daughter of the director of a multinational pharmaceuticals giant. He life was perfect, she had everything she wanted until she fell victim to a virus known as the Creep. The Creep rewrites your DNA, causing you to become fused to inorganic matter - to become a Hybrid. Kestrella's particular bonding it fairly light, her hand and her mobile phone having become one.

Because of the Creep Britain has been isolated, quarantined by a world trying to keep the affliction from spreading. The Government is becoming more and more right wing, imposing more and more stringent laws regarding Hybrids whilst allowing vigilantes targeting them to go unpunished. Britain is becoming a fascist state.

Kestrella's mother, also Hybrid, has disappeared and her father acts as though she no longer exists. Kestrella recruits another Hybrid, a computer genius known as Johnny Online, to help her track down her mother. Johnny is the novel's true central character and by far the most Creep afflicted person she's met. His face is fused to a computer monitor on which he plays images, he has a keyboard as part of his left arm and his body has speakers, numerous computer connections and tubes attached - including the tubes through which he now feeds.

Together the two attempt to avoid the patrols that could see them imprisoned in the Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation and track down Kestrella's mother.

This future Britain is not a place you would want to live - even if you were not a Hybrid. It's a dangerous depressing country, very much akin to Philip K. Dick's version of a future America in his fiction. Johnny and Kestrella are poles apart in terms of their background, two characters that would never have been brought together were it not for a shared disease.

It's a trick I've seen many times in young adult fiction, but one you rarely get in adult science fiction. Horror and romantic fiction use this often, exploring how people from different social backgrounds interact, but not sf. This makes this somewhat refreshing to read, adding a sense of novelty.

Young Adult fiction at its best is dark, very dark - often much darker than adult fiction. David Thorpe's debut novel Hybrids is most certainly dark. His characters live desperate lives, afraid of their own lives and what the Creep is doing to them. Thorpe doesn't look down on his readers either intellectually or emotionally - he pulls no punches here. People's lives are ruined and even ended by this disease and he's not about to wave a magickal wand fixing everything in an "and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after" way.

This is exactly the kind of book I would have loved to read as a 12-year-old, and one that also managed to entertain the adult me.

Synopsis
A thrilling sci-fi novel set in a believeable - and terrifying - near future...Hybrids is the winning entry to the HarperCollins nationwide new author competition with SAGA Magazine. Johnny Online and Kestrella are hybrids - victims of "Creep", a pandemic sweeping the country which causes sufferers to merge with items of technology when over-exposed to their use. Kestrella persuades a wary Johnny to help her find her missing mother, but the Gene Police have other plans for him...Powerful, compelling, and narrated alternately by Johnny and Kes, it questions our human dependence on technology, and our reactions in the face of nationwide panic. This was the outstanding winner of the Children's Book Writing Competition run in conjunction with SAGA Magazine. Orange-prize winning author Helen Dunmore -- one of the judges -- says: "The writing is sharp, the dialogue good, and the action pacey and page-turning. But there's a real depth to this story, too. Like all good fiction it makes the reader see the world in a different light".