Age 8-12
“There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.” So opens this suspenseful, well-told and touching story, in which a baby survives the murder of his family and is adopted by the ghosts in an ancient graveyard. The spectres, from different periods of history, are full of quirky character. The boy (called Nobody because he “looks like nobody”, but known as Bod) grows up having strange encounters - each a short story in itself - with humans and supernatural beings, some quaint, some grotesque. Ghouls, for instance, are named after the first person they ate: variously, “the Bishop of Bath and Wells” and “the famous writer Victor Hugo”. Then, when Bod is in his teens, those that hunted his family track him down... Chris Riddell embellishes the tale with elegant illustrations, some of which (four threatening villains, for example) communicate as much as the text; others, perhaps, are too explicit for Gaiman's suggestive style. The book's comic touch mitigates its creepiness, though, and its message is that, however much fun it is to learn ghostly skills such as “fading”, being alive is better: “That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.”

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, illus Chris Riddell
Bloomsbury £12.99

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