The judges read extensively and intensely in their search for the winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize this year [2012], but decided unanimously that The Unforgotten Coat's great immediacy and humour really set it apart. 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 preaches 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. * Julia Eccleshare *