The Unforgotten Coat: 1

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The Unforgotten Coat is an enchanting story about learning new lessons, experiencing new cultures, and re-discovering lost friends and memories. From the best-selling author of Cosmic and Millions comes an evocative immigration tale about two brothers trying to survive- a daring story that miraculously defies belief.

In the past Cottrell Boyce has said that compared with the impact of books on susceptible young minds, culture for adults – films, books, whatever – is basically a "pastime". Did the Olympics opening ceremony change his mind, or does he think its content didn't much matter – or matter enough to change anything? He has also created a fantastic trilogy, writtenwith his trademark wit, warmth and sense of story, based upon Ian Fleming's novel, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, comprising Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon. Mrs Spendlove was still there, incredibly, and she recognised me right away. Thirty-four years she’s taught there. Imagine that. Millionswas was later turned into a film by Danny Boyle and it features in the Book Trust’s 100 Best Books List for 9-11 year olds. They poked and pestered little Nergui, who still had his hat pulled right down, hiding his eyes. They kept telling him to make eagle noises. The kid – Nergui – huddled down in his coat, pulled his arms out of his sleeves and crossed them over his chest. His sleeves were flapping loose and he did fully look like a bird.A Liverpool supporter, he has strong views about the findings of last month's Hillsborough report, although he has turned down requests to write about it out of deference to those writers who were there. "It's a defining event for Liverpool, in the same way that Bloody Sunday is a defining event for Derry," he says, adding that the conspiracy to blame the fans was "like John Webster, it's something from T he Duchess of Malfi". At times he seems startled by his own vehemence. "I'm really ranting here, aren't I?" he says at one point. Although he probably wouldn't say so, Cottrell Boyce is a writer with a clear moral purpose, who believes the whole point of books is to extend our imaginative reach, and give us pleasure in the process. Recently he has been reading stories by George Saunders, recommended by his adult sons, and the children's books of Rumer Godden with his youngest. "I'm on this mission to read all the books I've given people the impression that I've read or fooled myself into thinking that I have read, all the stuff I've bullshitted about, that's my mission."

Based on a true story this is an unforgettable and moving account of one girl's vivid memories of two Mongolian brothers briefly at her school. He says he is slow, prone to distractions, and when asked why he did something often names a person or a favour ("I'm very big on loyalty, very big on friendship maybe"). Writing can be "isolating, you have those days when you've been working on something for a year and you suddenly think actually this doesn't add up at all". One of the joys of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang books is that everyone knows the story and can talk about it. It's also the first time he has worked with an illustrator, Joe Berger, who agreed to make the family a mixed-race one. TODAY we reveal two extracts from The Unforgotten Coat, the book written especially for The Reader Organisation’s Our Read project by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

This is a stunning magical story of a summer of friendship with darker undertones of the plight of refugees. Two refugee brothers from Mongolia are determined to fit in with their Liverpool schoolmates, but bring so much of Mongolia to Bootle that their new friend and guide, Julie, is hard-pressed to know truth from fantasy as she recollects a wonderful friendship that was abruptly ended when Chingis and his family were forced to return to Mongolia. Told with the humour, warmth and brilliance of detail which characterizes Frank Cottrell Boyce's writing, this magical and compelling story is enriched by stunning and atmospheric Polaroid photos.

With his brilliant depiction of two brothers from Mongolia trying to adapt to school in Liverpool while haunted by a fear from home, Frank Cottrell Boyce never preachers to the reader, and judges felt that he writes with such credibility and warmth that his readers will be left wiser when they have finished the story." Year Six. We had been at school for six years and until that moment I thought I had probably learned all I would ever to learn. I knew how to work out the volume of a cube. I knew who painted the “Sunflowers”. I could tell you the history of St. Lucia. I knew about lines of the Tudors, and lines of symmetry and the importance of eating five portions of fruit a day. But in all that time, I had never had a single lesson in eagle-calming. I had never ever heard the subject mentioned. I’d had no idea that a person might need eagle-calming skills.But he wanted to be a writer, not an academic, and was soon working for Phil Redmond's new Liverpool-based TV soap Brookside ("it wasn't difficult", he says, "they were taking anyone with a Liverpool postcode, the hard thing was to be kept on"). More TV commissions followed, and work as a critic for Living Marxism magazine, then a stint on Coronation Street and the meeting with Michael Winterbottom at Thames TV that led to Cottrell Boyce's first screenwriting credit, in 1995, for serial killer road movie Butterfly Kiss. Being read to at school changed my life. I really became aware of that during the Olympics because we were all of us in that room drawing on stuff we'd read as children and none of it was stuff we were examined on, it wasn't anything measurable. It was stuff that people had shared with us that we went on to share. If you look at that ceremony and what was in it, it was a sense of wonderment in storytelling. We found we had this common heritage – Mary Poppins and so on." Selected by a distinguished independent panel of experts including our editorial expert, Julia Eccleshare, for Diverse Voices - 50 of the best Children's Books celebrating cultural diversity in the UK. So is he a children's author? A screenwriter? An academic? Or some clever combination of all three, with a handy rapport with the Fleming estate thrown in? Cottrell Boyce was born in 1959 into a Roman Catholic Liverpool family and remembers an idyllic childhood. The church loomed large, a physical as well as spiritual presence, and he was one of those to whom its rituals and miracles made perfect sense. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs one of his choices was Oliver Postgate reading Noggin the Nog. Another was a 60s recording of Irish children recounting Bible stories, their voices full of wonder and conviction. In this world of expanding opportunity it felt natural enough that he, first in his family to make it to university, should go from his Catholic grammar school to read English at Keble College, Oxford.