The Graveyard Book

Gaiman begins with a murdered family and then tells a surprisingly gentle story: a boy brought up by the ghosts of a graveyard, growing towards the world of the living. The mix of darkness and warmth is its distinctive quality, and readers who have turned to it in a time of loss speak of comfort and hope. It is written for young adults, runs to some 300 pages, and rewards adults just as well.

Worth knowing A toddler climbs out of his cot while a man called Jack is murdering the rest of his family and wanders up the hill into the graveyard, where the dead take him in, a ghost couple adopt him, the Freedom of the Graveyard lets him fade and walk through walls, and a guardian who is neither living nor dead, Silas, brings him food; they call him Nobody Owens, Bod for short, and the book follows him from two to fifteen, one chapter every couple of years, while Jack is still looking. Neil Gaiman took the shape from The Jungle Book, with a graveyard for a jungle, and published it in 2008; it won the Newbery Medal in 2009 and the Carnegie Medal in 2010, the first book to take both. For ten and up, and the opening chapter is the most frightening thing he has written for children.

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