Kit’s Wilderness
On sale
21st November 2013
Price: £7.99
Kit has just moved to Stoneygate with his family, to live with his ageing grandfather who is gradually succumbing to Alzheimer’s Disease. Stoneygate is an insular place, scarred by its mining history – by the danger and death it has brought them. Where the coal mine used to be there is now a wilderness.
Here Kit meets Askew, a surly and threatening figure who masterminds the game called Death, a frightening ritual of hypnotism; and Kit makes friends with Allie, the clever school troublemaker. As Kit struggles to adjust to his new life and the gradual failing of his beloved grandfather, these two friendships pull him towards a terrifying resolution. Haunted by ghosts of the past, Kit must confront death and – ultimately – life.
A stunning novel from the author of the modern children’s classic Skellig – winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. David Almond is also winner of the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen award.
Here Kit meets Askew, a surly and threatening figure who masterminds the game called Death, a frightening ritual of hypnotism; and Kit makes friends with Allie, the clever school troublemaker. As Kit struggles to adjust to his new life and the gradual failing of his beloved grandfather, these two friendships pull him towards a terrifying resolution. Haunted by ghosts of the past, Kit must confront death and – ultimately – life.
A stunning novel from the author of the modern children’s classic Skellig – winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. David Almond is also winner of the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen award.
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Reviews
An enthralling, multi-layered and complex story with a tension that builds and grips the reader. A wonder ful read.
Could a children's book win the Booker? The best writing is the kind that defies categories, and Almond's Kit's Wilderness makes the grade.
A children's book of stunning freshness and individuality.
This superb piece of lyrically-written literary fiction captivates teenagers and their parents alike.
You can feel the chill from the ghosts that haunt its pages. An essential read from an original voice in children's books.
David Almond is a writer of subtle, page-turning and daring exactness, and he applies the same potent poetic and emphatic skills in his equally moving new novel.
Gripping, convincing and effortlessly well-written
Has the same mesmerising quality of writing and a hauntingly intense plot.
Very touching.
Sensitive and absorbing.
Deeper and more unsettling than Almond's breakthrough book.
The book treats all the great universal themes of literature - love, loss, redemption, mortality - with elegant, tender simplicity, and it is bound to touch any reader of whatever age.
Almond's masterpiece: Kit's Wilderness is one of those rare works that changes how we see the world
A moving rites-of-passage novel.
Dark and gripping.
A haunting read for thoughtful readers.
An essential read from an original voice.
Almond's magic is subtle, breath-taking, redemptive.
A writer of subtle, page-turning and daring exactness.
Extremely good. Written with an acute sense of place plus a touch of the supernatural.
Dark and gripping.
Magic of a very different kind