Noughts & Crosses (novel series)

Noughts & Crosses is a series by English author Malorie Blackman of young adult novels, including two novellas, set in a fictional dystopia. The series describes an alternative history in which African people had gained a technological and organisational advantage over the European people, rather than the other way around, with Africans having made Europeans their slaves. The series takes place in an alternate 21st-century Britain.

At the time of the series, slavery had been abolished for some time, but segregation, similar to the Jim Crow Laws, continues to operate to keep the crosses (Blacks) in control of the noughts (Whites). An international organisation, the Pangaean Economic Community, exists. Seeming to be similar to the United Nations in scope but similar to the European Union in powers, it is playing a role in forcing change by directives and boycotts.

The book is written from two different perspectives Callum’s and Sephy’s and their experience of their entwined but very different worlds. The chapters take turns with even chapters being Callum’s and consequently odd ones Sephy’s.

Noughts & Crosses

The book Noughts and Crosses is a dystopian fiction based in a 21st-century parallel universe. Their world, technologically at least, is similar to the one we live in today: about the same jobs, same type of government etc. But there is one key difference: the state of equality between races is somewhat lacking and there aren’t many laws or constitutions to protect from discrimination. There are two races in the book: the Crosses (darker skinned people who we in our current universe would call ‘black’) the superior race with the individuals owning lots of money, good jobs different and better schools etc. Whilst the second race: the noughts are at the poorer end of society usually doing manual labour or being servant to Crosses, with poor schools – if any at all – they are not slaves. It is important that that’s clear in the book: the races are still segregated in any way the Crosses find possible.

Sephy (or her full name Persephone) Hadley is a Cross, with dark skin, and the daughter of a wealthy senior politician, Kamal Hadley - who later takes office as president. Callum McGregor is a nought, with light skin. They used to play together when Jasmine, Sephy's mother, employed Meggie McGregor, Callum's mother, as a nanny. However, Jasmine fired Meggie for being unable to provide an alibi for her when Kamal confronts Jasmine's about his suspicions of her infidelity: that is only strongly suggested for now but is made explicit later. Only then did Meggie realise her mistake. Since then, Sephy and Callum's friendship has been secret. As best friends, their relationship is frowned upon by society, like interracial friendships in the Southern United States before the Civil Rights Movement but in reverse, as dark skin is considered much better to have than light skin.

Callum is one of the first few noughts to start at Heathcroft, a high school for Crosses that now accepts the best-performing noughts. Sephy is overjoyed to find that Callum is in her class after helping him pass the entrance examination. However, most of her classmates do not accept her association with a nought. The two develop a more intimate connection, and Sephy does not care about the opposition and even sits with at a table with noughts. That angers Callum, but the two make up.

Meanwhile, Callum's elder brother, Jude, and his father, Ryan, join the Liberation Militia (LM), a violent terrorist organisation against Cross supremacy. Jasmine becomes an alcoholic.

Callum's troubled elder sister, Lynette, commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a bus. Only Callum knows that it was suicide, as Lynette had left him a secret note that talks of her depression after an attack on her and her Cross boyfriend. Everyone else thinks that it was a tragic accident, despite all of her previous suicide attempts.

Jude and Ryan are accused of lethally bombing Dundale Shopping Centre, which was committed by the LM. Callum is also accused after he tells Sephy to get out of the shopping centre but goes free for lack of evidence. Callum has to leave school, and Ryan faces the gallows. Jasmine, remembering that she used to be friends with the McGregor family, secretly hires a prominent Cross lawyer to defend Ryan. Escaping hanging, Ryan gets a life sentence but is killed by an electric fence, supposedly in an escape attempt.

Sephy decides to get a new start and persuades a reluctant Jasmine to let her attend a boarding school, Chivers. Sephy has not heard from Callum for a week so she writes him a letter asking him to run away with her and telling him that she will be leaving for Chivers if he does not contact her. However, Callum has decided to join the LM, against the wishes of his mother, and he does not read the letter until just before Sephy leaves. Callum sprints to Sephy's house and fails to catch up with the car as it pulls out of the driveway. Having not seen Callum running behind, Sephy concludes that their friendship is no longer as important to him as she had thought.

Years later, Sephy returns home from Chivers. She enters the house and discovers that Callum had left her a letter telling her to meet him at the family's private beach. Sephy decides to meet up with him but later she finds out that Callum is there with others from the LM to kidnap her and hold her hostage. Jude punches Sephy in the stomach, and the gang members take her to their hideout. The members of the LM deliver a message to Sephy's father, Kamal, to release at least five LM from prison and pay money if he wants to see Sephy alive.

The LM's second-in-command, Andrew Dorn, visits Callum and his cell members. Andrew informs Kamal of where two of the LM team members are while they are making phone calls. One is killed, and the other is put in jail.

During a time alone, Callum visits a hurt Sephy in the room where she is being held. Callum reveals to Sephy that he tried to catch up with her before she left for Chivers, and he was unable to catch up with her. Their love rekindles and, after Callum whispers that he loves her, they make love. Afterwards, Sephy cannot seem to stop crying, and Jude walks in. He calls Callum an idiot for sleeping with her.

Sephy escapes into the woods and is soon chased by Jude and Morgan, the other survivor. Callum finds her and gives false instructions to the others. Callum then gives Sephy instructions to escape. Sephy tells Callum that she had seen Andrew, without knowing his identity, in her house with Kamal, which shows that Andrew is a government informer.

Callum tells the rest of the gang what Sephy said about Andrew. The members agree to split up and keep a low profile for six months and not meet up until Callum's birthday.

Sephy feels an unusual tummy bug come on. Her sister, Minerva, asks if she is pregnant, which Sephy denies. Sephy takes a pregnancy test, which reveals she is pregnant with Callum's child. Meanwhile, Callum is working as a mechanic, as a cover, and hears Kamal on the radio, denying rumours that his daughter is pregnant. Sephy's parents learn of her pregnancy and pressure her to have an abortion, but Sephy repeatedly refuses.

Callum then meets with Sephy in the Hadleys' rose garden. Sephy confirms the rumours, and they decide on names for the child: Ryan, after Callum's father, if it is a boy, and Callie Rose if it is a girl. Callum is found in the garden and is arrested. No one believes Sephy when she maintains that she was not raped. Callum has his trial and is sentenced to be hanged. Kamal tells Sephy that if she keeps her child, Callum will be hanged, but if she has the abortion, he will serve years in prison instead. Kamal makes a similar offer to Callum but also wants Callum to say publicly that he raped her. Both decide to keep the baby.

On the day of Callum's hanging, he asks his guard, Jack, to deliver a letter to Sephy personally. Callum is then led to the gallows. He fails to find Sephy in the crowd before the hood is put on. He then hears Sephy shouting, 'I love you'. He shouts back, 'I love you too'. Sephy watches the trapdoor open and sees Callum's limp, lifeless body hanging from the noose. She hears Callum shouting to her but is unsure if she heard the word 'too' so she cannot be sure that Callum heard her.

The story ends with a newspaper cutting announcing the birth of their child, Callie Rose, with an announcement from Sephy that her daughter will take her father's surname of McGregor. (However, in later books, it is revealed that Sephy changes her mind so that Callie Rose can grow up without knowing her father's role in the LM.)

Callum

The novella changes the ending of Noughts and Crosses and was published for World Book Day 2012.

Callum decides to let Sephy flee from the other kidnappers while they are out. While he shows her the way back to town, Sephy badly injures her foot. He talks her into spending the night with her in an abandoned shack for her to recover. There, they argue but then realise their mutual love. They decide to run away together. They fall asleep after making love.

The two are surprised by the rest of the gang. Jude and Callum point their guns at each other. Sephy takes advantage of the confusion to flee. Jude and Callum point their guns at each other, and the story ends as a cliffhanger.

An Eye For an Eye

The novella gives an insight into the events of Knife Edge. Written for World Book Day 2003, it has been republished in a new edition of Noughts & Crosses. An Eye For an Eye describes one evening while Sephy is pregnant with Callie Rose when her sister, Minerva, visits her. Minerva offers to patch up things with Jasmine, but Sephy tries to get Minerva to leave. As Sephy had feared after being followed by Jude for a few days, he arrives, planning to murder Sephy.

Jude, Callum's older brother, watches Sephy enter her apartment building, and he plans to kill her. However, he does not know that Minerva, is in Sephy's apartment as well.

Sephy tells Jude that she knew that he intended to kill her just before midnight since it was Callum's birthday that day. Jude feels that Sephy is responsible for Callum's death and wants to make sure that Sephy will not see Callum's next birthday since Callum had not seen his next birthday. Sephy is not alarmed and does not protest, but Minerva panics. Sephy tells Jude that he would be doing her a favour by killing her and wants to die because she misses Callum. When Minerva tries to change her mind, Sephy declares that she hates the baby because it was alive and that Callum should be alive instead. (That is a lie, and Sephy later threatens to kill Jude if he ever hurts her child.)

Sephy begins to provoke Jude by saying that she and Callum loved each other and Kamal offered her a choice of keeping the baby and letting Callum be hanged or getting an abortion and saving his life. Jude loses his temper and tries to shoot Sephy, but his gun jams. Minerva, in an attempt to save Sephy and herself, runs towards the front door and screams to attract attention. That fails, and Jude shoots her in the shoulder. Jude realises that Sephy seriously wants to die so he decides that since killing her would be to do her a favour, he will make her suffer instead.

Jude gives Sephy permission to call an ambulance for Minerva and tells her that he knows she cares about her sister and her family, especially her child. He then tells her that he plans to use her baby to hurt her. Sephy threatens to kill him if he hurts her child, but she later pleads with Jude to leave both of them alone. Jude leaves just as the ambulance arrives, with a new plan in mind. Sephy makes Minerva lie about her injuries.

Knife Edge

Sephy is a cross, the privileged treated by noughts as inferiors, but Callum was a nought. Callum's brother, Jude, blames Sephy for the terrible losses his family has suffered and is determined to destroy Sephy's life by any means necessary. He meets Cara Imega, a cross, and befriends her to access her money.

Sephy, living with Callum's mother, Meggie, becomes increasingly fond of her daughter, Callie Rose. Callum's guard, Jack, delivers a letter, written by Callum before he died, saying that he never loved her and could not believe that she was stupid enough to fall for him. Meggie tries to make Sephy believe that Callum was forced to write the letter by the rest of the gang, but the letter is so hurtful that Sephy believes it and becomes full of postnatal depression. She meets Jaxon, a hot-tempered man with a band, the Midges. He offers Sephy a singing part, but the noughts are prejudiced against her because she is a cross. She begins to neglect Callie Rose.

Cara spends a lot of time with Jude. Although he loathes Crosses, he begins to fall in love with her. Frustrated and confused with his feelings for a cross, Jude beats her severely and runs off with a large amount of money. After she dies in hospital, Jude is eventually arrested and charged with Cara's murder. He is virtually certain to get the death sentence since his fingerprints are all over her apartment and had been seen with her by several witnesses.

Sephy struggles with seeing Meggie losing the last remaining member of her family. Sephy decides, for Meggie's sake, to give Jude a false alibi for Cara's death. That works, and after serving a few months in prison for LM membership, Jude accuses Andrew of Cara's murder and calls him as a government informer; Andrew is soon shot dead by the LM. Jude, even though Sephy saved his miserable life, still holds his grudge against her and still plots a terrible revenge.

Sephy's life begins to fall apart. The crosses hate her because she helped Jude escape the noose, the noughts because she did not come to his aid sooner. She hugs her daughter too tightly while she sing the famous song "Rainbow Child". Callie Rose stops breathing, and Meggie screams at Sephy, "What have you done?" The book concludes in a cliffhanger without stating whether Callie Rose will survive.

Checkmate

Callie Rose struggles with growing up as half-nought and half-cross after she learns the truth about her nought father's life from her friend, Tobey, who calls her a terrorist's daughter. Callie Rose had been told by her mother that her father, Callum, had been a gardener who died in an accident. Callie Rose becomes angry with her mother, Sephy, for hiding the truth. She decides to follow the path of her father with her new hate-filled personality. She also cuts off her friendship with nought Tobey despite his attempts to apologise. Sephy feels trapped and rejects an offer of marriage from her boyfriend, Sonny. Sephy then meets Nathan, the owner of the restaurant in which she sings, and the two start a relationship.

Jude takes Callie Rose to Kamal's house. After Kamal denies that she is his granddaughter, Jude, now the General of the LM, exploits her anger to groom her to become a suicide bomber.

Callie Rose starts dating Lucas, a cross who is an ex-friend's brother. Jasmine, Sephy's mother, does what she can to bring Callie and Sephy closer together but develops breast cancer and struggles with her life. In a moment of weakness, she drinks a glass of wine despite having banned herself from alcohol for life. Nathan proposes to Sephy, who accepts, but Sonny shows up in her life again. Sephy is left confused but engaged.

Celine Lubanjah, the daughter of Callum's prison guard Jack, gives a letter that was written by Callum before he was hanged. Callum told Jack this is the letter with his real feelings. Callum says in the letter he greatly wishes that he had been able to stay with Sephy, as he loved her so much. He also tells Sephy to keep his past secret from their child.

Sephy and Callie Rose resume their relationship after Jasmine traps them in her wine cellar so that they sort things out. Jasmine sets off the bomb to prevent Jude from injuring anyone else. Kamal had been the intended target of the bomb, but he only loses power, after Jasmine had sent a letter to the press about his rampant corruption.

Double Cross

Kamal's party loses the election badly to a more liberal government, but Callie Rose knows secretly that she made the bomb that killed Jasmine and that it was intended it for her ex-husband, Kamal. Callie Rose also fears that Jude, her uncle, is still alive since he is known for serving revenge cold. Also, the press fails to mention Jude in connection to the bomb but notes the death of Robert Powers.

Her best friend and later boyfriend, Tobey, is worried about his own future. As a nought boy at an exclusive school, Tobey hopes to keep out of trouble, go to university, get a good job and leave behind the dangerous streets of his childhood. However, he cannot keep clinging to some kind of no-man's land while the neighbourhood around him is carved up by rival gangs, one headed by a ruthless man, Alex McAuley, the head of a gang of noughts, and another headed by the Dowds, the head of a gang of crosses. Both are powerful gangs that frequently injure and kill each other's members as well as suspected informants.

Tobey is offered the chance to earn some ready money just making a few 'deliveries' after he is introduced by a friend, Dan, who works for McAuley. Tobey wants no part of the world of gangs but makes an exception for once.

Tobey finds out that the delivery was the little finger of one of the Dowds, a manager at the restaurant. He keeps the secret from his girlfriend. They start kissing and touching each other. Callie Rose asks Tobey if he is ready.

Tobey takes her hand and places it over his erection. Callie Rose agrees, and Tobey manages to find a condom from under his bed from one of the five whole spare packets under his bed. Callie Rose teases him about being a sexbot. Tobey and Callie Rose resume kissing after Tobey has put the condom on. They both strip and make love. At first, it is painful for Callie Rose, but then Tobey 'enters her fully', and it is pleasurable for both of them. Callie Rose then leaves but promises to meet Tobey again.

The next day, when Dan, Tobey and Callie Rose get together, Callie Rose is shot by a hail of bullets from McAuley. Her surgery is successful, but she ends up in coma. Sephy is furious at Tobey for not becoming more of a man and telling the police who shot Callie Rose. Sephy does not know that Tobey has sworn revenge on McAuley and plans on doing so 'himself'.

While Callie Rose is in hospital, Tobey gets a new job at TFTM (Thanks for the Memories), the Dowds' restaurant. He meets Rebecca, Vanessa Dowd's daughter. Rebecca loves his company, as he treats her like a person, unlike other boys, who are interested only in her family and money. Tobey eventually goes out with her but is confused between her and Callie Rose.

Callie Rose wakes from her coma and finds out that Robert Powers was a false identity of Jude, who thus was certainly killed by the bomb. However, she learns that Tobey is dating Rebecca and that she had been in coma for so long.

During a visit to Vanessa Dowd's house, Tobey is revealed to have been making deliveries for McAuley. Rebecca is shocked, but Tobey reassures her that he does not work for him any longer. However, he decides to end their relationship and become merely 'friends'. When Rebecca leaves, McAuley appears and stabs her. He then orders Tobey to meet him at his warehouse.

Tobey knows that McAuley wants to kill him, but a plan is set up with Owen Dowd, Rebecca's brother. He puts a great deal of money in Byron Sweet, one of McAuley's minions, to frame him as a traitor. He goes to the warehouse and successfully executes his plan. However, he is almost killed by two more of McAuley's minions. Luckily, Dan appears from nowhere and kills the two minions outside and McAuley, saving Tobey's life. Dan ends up on the run.

Jasmine, in her will, gives both houses, including the beach, to Sephy. She also gives sums to her Meggie (to whom she writes a letter of apology), Callie Rose, Minerva, Zuri, Taj and Sarah.

Tobey tells Callie that he is responsible for the deaths of five people (Rebecca Dowd, Bryon Sweet, Alex McAuley and minions Dave and Scott) and that Dan is on the run. Callie then points out that Jasmine and Jude died because of her. They eventually resume their relationship and admit their love.

In the epilogue, it is revealed that both Callie and Tobey go to university to study law and that Tobey has set up and helps fund the Meadowview Shelter to help those with drug and alcohol addictions.

Characters

The character from all books from the series are as follows:

Audio books

Abridged audio books have been made from all of the series except Callum and An Eye For an Eye. As the character narrating the story changes with each chapter, each narrator is played by a different actor. Sephy is played by Nina Sosanya, Callum by Nigel Greaves, Jude by John Hasler, Meggie by Joan Walker, Callie Rose by Nicole Davis, Jasmine by Adjoa Andoh and Tobey by Nigel Pilkington. The additional parts of the story were read by the author in the first book and by Joan Walker in the three other books.

There is also an unabridged audiobook of the first book of the series, with Callum's chapters read by Paul Chequer and Sephy's by the late Sian Blake.

Adaptations

The first book, Noughts & Crosses, was retitled Black & White and was adapted and directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company^[1] by former RSC Associate Dominic Cooke, with Richard Madden and Ony Uhiara in the lead roles of Callum and Sephy. The play garnered positive reviews, with Blackman herself saying that she "knew it was in really safe hands".^[2] It toured the UK from February to April 2008.

A second theatre adaptation of the first book titled Noughts and Crosses is due to premiere at Derby Theatre in February 2019, and then tour the UK. This stage version is adapted by Sabrina Mahfouz for Pilot Theatre.^[3]

The first book was also the subject of the last edition in February 2012 of BBC Radio 4's "Saturday Drama".

In August 2016, the BBC announced that Noughts & Crosses would be dramatised for television.^[4] Being Human creator Toby Whithouse is involved in overseeing the scripts.^[5] Jay Z's company Roc Nation and Participant Media will executive produce the series. ^[6]

Awards and nominations

• 2002, Lancashire Children's Book of the Year.^[7]
• 2002, Red House Children's Book Award.^[7][8]
• 2002, Sheffield Children's Book Award.^[7][8]
• 2003, Wirral Paperback of the Year Award.^[7][8]
• 2004, Fantastic Fiction Award.^[7]
• 2005, Berkshire Book Award (shortlist).^[8]
• 2005, Lancashire Children's Book of the Year (shortlist).^[8]
• 2005, Redbridge Teenage book Award (shortlist).^[8]
• 2006, Lancashire Children's Book of the Year (shortlist).^[8]
• 2006, Staffordshire Young People's Book of the Year.^[8]

References

External links

• Noughts & Crosses at Malorie Blackman's official website
• Knife Edge at Malorie Blackman's official website
• Checkmate at Malorie Blackman's official website
• Double Cross at Malorie Blackman's official website
• Malorie Blackman's plot description of Noughts & Crosses at meettheauthor.com