THE BLUE NOTE BOOK by James A Levine, Phoenix, £7.99

THE notebook in the title is 15-year-old Batuk’s only escape from her grim life on the streets in Mumbai, India's biggest city.

Sold into sexual slavery by her father, she is both entrapped and forsaken.

Yet her journal is her salvation. In it she can record her private thoughts and stories which bring her hope, beauty and resilience of spirit.

A moving tribute to the powers of imagination and the buoyancy of childhood.

CHRIS BURGESS