The Radio in the Attic

Omar and his family moved into his grandfather's old house at the beginning of the summer. It was a big house with a heavy wooden door, a little garden with one tall date palm, and a narrow staircase leading up to an attic nobody had entered for years.

"Don't go up to the attic, Omar," said his father, carrying boxes. "It's full of dust."

But don't go up were exactly the words that made Omar want to go up.

Omar was ten, and he loved two things more than anything else: science books, and taking old gadgets apart to find out what was inside. In his old bedroom he'd had a whole box of screws, wires and tiny bulbs, which his mother called "the box of wonderful mess". He dreamed of becoming an inventor and building a machine that could solve all the world's problems in one go.