Last Word on the Carnegie Medal by Paul May

You might think that, having read all 84 Carnegie Medal winning books, I would be able to tell you how to write a Carnegie Medal winning book. Sadly, I can't. But if winning the Carnegie is your aim in life then I can give you a few pointers, starting with a few things not to do:

Don't write non-fiction books. Despite what it says on the Carnegie website you have virtually no chance of winning with facts.

Don't write poetry (unless you're prepared to turn your poetry into a novel - see below!). No poetry collection has ever won the Carnegie.

Don't write fiction for 5-8 year olds. This vitally important area of children's reading experience has been almost entirely neglected by the judging panels over the years. Any one of the books in Alan Garner's Stone Book Quartet, for example, would have deserved to win, but they weren't even shortlisted. Jane Gardam committed both this error and the next one when she had two books highly commended in the same year, 1981, but didn't win with either. The Hollow Land, was a short story collection, and Bridget and William, was written for younger children.

Don't write collections of short stories unless, like Geraldine McCaughrean in A Pack of Lies, you can find a clever way of embedding your stories in a larger narrative. The Carnegie was awarded to Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon for story collections but that was a long time ago. 

Don't get someone else to write your book for you. No ghostwritten book has won so far, but I suppose there's always a first time. I don't think the rules say you have to have written your own book but I suppose they didn't think it needed saying.

So, are there any 'Dos'? 

I'm not sure there are, other than to say that if winning the Carnegie is your ambition you should almost certainly write for older children or teenagers. Realism is probably best, maybe with a touch of magic or oddness, and historical fiction is also a good bet. Writing a really excellent book is a good idea, but that certainly doesn't guarantee you a win. Three of the last ten winners have been written in verse, so that might be a help. In 2019 three of the eight shortlisted titles were in verse.

Of course, it's equally difficult to say how to write a best seller. Some Carnegie winners have been best sellers but many more have not.  I'm sure most children's authors are not like Lee Child (and certainly not as wealthy) in that they simply write the books they want to write and then try to get them published, rather than deliberately setting out to write a best seller, or indeed a Carnegie winner.

Reading all these winners hasn't taught me how to win the Carnegie, but it has thrown up some wonderful surprises, which is what I hoped would happen when I began back at the start of 2020. My main aim was to find out more about those writers I'd never read and, in some cases, never even heard of. Many of the surprises came from reading other books by the winning authors. I've no interest in compiling a league table of my favourite winners. Instead, here's a selection of surprising finds that you might enjoy, and links to the posts where they're discussed.

1. The novels of Walter de la Mare. I knew de la Mare mainly through his poems and anthologies and had never even heard of The Three Mulla Mulgars (or The Three Royal Monkeys in its alternative title), or of his very strange novel, Memoir of a Midget. There's also a huge biography by Theresa Whistler.

2. Elfrida Vipont. Vipont wrote the text of The Elephant and the Bad Baby but she also wrote a series of semi-autobiographical novels starting with The Lark in the Morn and continuing with the Carnegie winning The Lark on the Wing. These books opened a window onto a world I'd never encountered before, young working women sharing flats in London after the end of WW2. The novels are also about Quaker society and the Quaker-run businesses where the girls often work. The books linked up for me things I knew about Quaker involvement in the temperance movement, Quaker chocolate businesses like Cadbury's and Rowntree's and my own family's Quaker ancestors who ran temperance coffee stalls and cafés in Norwich. Elfrida Vipont wrote plenty of other books, many on Quaker subjects, as well as some adventure stories for boys published under the name Charles Vipont.

3. William Mayne. I want to mention him here in order to argue that we should separate the books from the man and value them for their remarkable qualities. I'll stop reading them when everyone stops using Gill Sans font and all the other fonts based on it, and all of Eric Gill's sculptures are removed from public places. A Swarm in May remains one of my favourite children's books, and Mayne's Carnegie winner, A Grass Rope, while not as good, is still a remarkable book. And actually even if they did cancel Eric Gill's work I'd still read William Mayne.

4. Charles Keeping. It's hard to imagine Rosemary Sutcliff's winner, The Lantern Bearers without Keeping's cover and illustrations and I wonder if The God Beneath the Sea would have won without his illustrations (The Golden Shadow is even better). Mollie Hunter benefitted from his wonderful cover for The Stronghold, and it seems a shame that he wasn't commissioned to provide illustrations too, as he did for Mollie Hunter's lovely first book, Patrick Kentigern Keegan. You can visit The Keeping Gallery in South London by appointment, and that's where I'll be on the day this post is published.

5. Mollie Hunter. She's an author I hadn't read who seems shamefully neglected south of the border (she was Scottish). Mollie Hunter was big in the USA where she toured with her kilted husband and gave talks on children's literature (she also wrote a book about writing for children called Talent is not Enough). I've read a lot of her books now. They are never less than very good, and often outstanding. In particular I recommend the semi-autobiographical A Sound of Chariots. Probably more like 7/8 autobiographical. That first book I mentioned above is great too with its Keeping illustrations, and I recently read The Walking Stones which is a perfect example of the way Mollie Hunter could integrate the supernatural into everyday modern life.

6. Robert Westall. His work was always interesting and often brilliant. If you like cats, he's the man for you. Three of his novels are among my very favourite children's books. His first book, The Machine Gunners, won the Carnegie. Just as good is another book set in WW2, The Kingdom by the Sea, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, and then there's Gulf, set during the first Gulf war and like nothing else I've ever read. I also recommend Westall's autobiography about his childhood, The Making of Me. 

7. Terry Pratchett. It's a funny one, this. For years I've attempted to read Pratchett's adult books and found myself unable to get on with them. And then I read The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents and loved it. I think it's a brilliant children's book, right up there with the very best. So I tried another Discworld novel and it was no good. I mean, I'm sure it's good. People love them. Just not for me. So I think I'll stick to his children's books, and reading Maurice was one of the biggest surprises of this whole project.

8. Geraldine McCaughrean. Where the World Ends is a remarkable achievement and if I haven't enjoyed others of McCaughrean's books quite as much, that may well be because it's hard to imagine anything else being as good.

9. Anthony McGowan. OK, I said I wasn't going to pick a favourite, but if I had to take just one Carnegie Winner to a desert island it would be Lark. I'd take it to remind me how much can be expressed in clear, direct language that anyone of any age can read and understand. 

And finally let's remember that the list of Carnegie Medal winners tells us almost nothing about what children have actually been reading for the last 90 years. I mentioned that story collections have no chance of winning the Carnegie, so it's no surprise that Michael Bond's Paddington never had a sniff. Nor did William Brown, or My Naughty Little Sister, or Milly-Molly-Mandy, or Clever Polly. All these books are still in print and selling well.

Here are a few authors who haven't won the Carnegie. I'm sure you can think of more: Jane Gardam, Jacqueline Wilson, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, JRR Tolkien, Terry Deary, Alison Uttley, Brian Jacques, Geoffrey Trease, Henry Treece, Joan Aiken, J K Rowling, Malcolm Saville, Susan Cooper, Catherine Storr . . . I won't even mention all the mountains of series fiction. 

Even more finally I'll end this whole Carnegie thing by quoting from I W Cornwall's The Making of Man, the last non-fiction book to win the Carnegie (in 1960). Non-fiction books can date more quickly than novels, but Ian Cornwall managed to say things that still resonate today:

'We, as individuals, are already so specialised, each in his own part of the work of our brittle civilisation, that most of the civilised survivors of some world-wide conflict or cataclysm would starve in a month or two.

Man now stands alone indeed, on a pinnacle of his own contriving, from which it would be only too easy for him to fall. Life would still go on, only retreating a little to make another leap forward.

The death of the dinosaurs might have seemed, to an observer gifted with reason but not foresighted, to be a disastrous destruction of the finest and most advanced creatures that nature could devise. We now know that their eclipse merely made room for the new experiment to begin, which has culminated in our own species. The 80 foot monsters with hen's-egg-sized brains could not have conceived of men. How, then, can we hope to imagine what sort of natural beings will take our places if—or, rather, when—homo sapiens becomes extinct? They will be different. That is all we know.'

Have a good Christmas!

  

Walking Home from School—Then and Now—by Paul May

A dozen Carnegie winners.
Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds won in 2021

On his website Jason Reynolds has a film, Dear Dreamer, (there's a link lower down) which was produced 'in collaboration with the hardworking students, educators and dreamers of Atlanta.' In the film he says 'I think I just want to create work which makes young people feel cared for.' This reminded me of Elizabeth Acevedo's statement that 'I hold young people more tenderly,' (than adult readers). She was suggesting, I think, that in her adult work she is more honest—things are less likely to turn out well there. She allows more hope to younger readers. 

Jason Reynolds means something different, or maybe something extra, because he does show great tenderness towards his characters. Bad things happen but people make it through by caring for each other. The extra thing he's saying is that by writing about the lives of people just like his readers he is caring for them. 'I want people to read it and think . . . yo, this feels real.'

You might expect that characters who feel real to readers in the inner city somewhere in the USA in 2021 wouldn't feel the same to a reader who grew up in a leafy dormitory village on the outskirts of London in the 1950s and yet in many ways they do. Look Both Ways is a collection of stories about things that happen during the journey from school to home. It's a great idea, and a far more straightforward way of freeing children from the tyranny of adult supervision than bumping off their parents in the first paragraph or two, as has been known to happen in children's fiction. And as soon as I'd finished reading, memories started bubbling up from my own childhood. Some of those events even echoed those in Look Both Ways.

Jason Reynolds says in Dear Dreamer: 'You knew who had the mean dogs and whose dog was always off the leash . . . You knew who had the rottweiler, who had the pitbull.' Well, we knew where the corgis lived. They were halfway up School Lane in a bungalow with a gate that was sometimes left open, and if it was open half a dozen corgis would race out, yapping and snapping at your ankles. You had to run fast. Not far beyond that bungalow there was a haunted house and then, after the abandoned orchard, was the main road where I once scared a driver into terrifying anger by (according to her) running in front of her car. I failed to look both ways. And then there was the conker tree incident, which gave me an early experience of betrayal and injustice.

I was walking home with my mate Chris (AKA Bubbles), exploring an alleyway we'd never taken before, when we looked over a gate and saw a conker tree on the opposite side of a field. As we were wondering whether it was OK to run across and grab some, a boy from the top class arrived and told us it was fine. So we went and fetched some high-class conkers and when we got back to the gate he was gone. 

The next morning in assembly the headteacher announced that he'd been watching from his office and seen two boys trespassing on the field behind the school. He demanded that the boys owned up, so of course we kept quiet. We'd heard that one before. But then that big boy who'd encouraged us put his hand up and said he knew who did it. What a creep! We both got the strap for that.

Later, we took a look at that conker tree and couldn't understand how we'd failed to notice that it was really just on the edge of the school field, and the evil headteacher would have had a great view. It was almost as if, on leaving the school gates and turning right instead of left we'd entered a different universe, disconnected from the one we normally lived in. And that's kind of what happens in Look Both Ways. You think things are separate but it turns out they're all connected.

That space between home and school is fascinating. It's a boundary zone, a no-man's-land, where all kinds of things can happen. It can be a time and space to make or cement friendships, or a time to learn to be independent. Walking home on your own for the first time is a big deal, as Fatima discovers in Look Both Ways. The first time she does it, Fatima falls and scrapes her knees and meets a crazy woman with pink trousers, but she doesn't tell her mother because 'that would be an end to the babysitterless life . . . and she didn't want that because even though that first walk was rough, anything was worth trying again if it meant she could come home and be alone in her house . . .'

Her mother says, when she hears about the knees, 'I keep telling you, you have to pay attention, sweetheart . . . You have to look both ways and all ways. That even includes, despite what your dad says, down.'

You need to pay attention when you read this book. There are ten linked stories about kids on their way home from school and the stories delve deep into the lives of those children and their families, but they do this with a very light touch. They observe something very important about school life, something I don't recall seeing explored before in this kind of detail, and something that it's very easy to forget about if you're an adult, and especially if you're a teacher. It's the fact that any given child only really knows a handful of the others in the class.

The different groups of kids and individuals intersect with each other throughout the book, so characters in one story appear in other stories but you see how those groups and kids are known to others only tangentially, by their reputations or by rumour. So, for example, in the book's second story there's a gang called the 'Low Cuts.' 

"All I can tell you is if you ever see John John Watson, Francy Baskin, Trista Smith, or especially Britton "Bit" Burns—the Low Cuts—better watch your pockets. These four, they'll steal anything that jingles." 

The Low Cuts steal small change wherever they can find it. No one but the Low Cuts knows why they do it. Nor does the reader until they reach the last page of the story. 

I started thinking about my own time at school. It’s true. I knew only my own small group of friends. Sure, there were others I played football with or had classes with, but they were like work colleagues, not friends. I knew their names because I heard the register in the mornings and I'd work with them if I had to, but there's an invisible barrier between association and friendship and I don't think it's just me being unsociable. From each class I was in I can only remember a handful of people, and that goes for university too.

I value this book for the exceptional acuteness of its observation of children and the way they interact, for its humour and humanity, for the sharpness of its dialogue and for its delight in language—there's a wonderful stream-of-consciousness improvisation at the end on the theme of school buses which makes a great climax and pulls the whole thing together. Look Both Ways has qualities which I believe mean it will continue to be read for a long time, but that's not the intention of Jason Reynolds. Here's what he says at the end of Dear Dreamer: 

'I always say if my books are still being read forty years from now—in schools—they're still being taught—that the books that are introducing young people to literacy in schools—I've failed. Forty years from now we ain't figured out new books yet? Language is living, it's growing, it's expanding, it's changing, it's evolving. People are living and growing and changing and expanding and evolving. Books have to continue to do the exact same thing in order for me to see eye to eye with the young people.' 

(My transcription. Apologies for any errors. You can watch the video here.)

Reynolds's wariness about what happens to his books in schools is understandable, and his publishers, Simon and Schuster, clearly want to establish Look Both Ways as a feature of the curriculum. You might want to take a look at their comprehensive 'Reading Group Guide'. But the thing is, as an editor once said to me, books stick around for a long time. And although all that stuff about growing and changing and evolving is true, one thing I took from this book is that children don't change that much; human relations don't change that much. It's why we still read Shakespeare and Chaucer and Arthur Ransome and Noel Streatfeild. (There's a new production of Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre.) 

Sixty-odd years after I started walking home from school alone in an English village, kids are doing very similar things thousands of miles away on the other side of an ocean. And that's why I think this particular book will stick around to be read by the grandchildren of the kids who read it today.

A Poet and a Lark - Two Great Carnegie winners - by Paul May

Elizabeth Acevedo has a story she tells about rats. And a poem. The story concerns a creative writing professor (and poet) who tells her that rats are not noble enough creatures to be the subject of an ode, and she needs to get more experience. You can watch Acevedo tell the story and deliver the poem on YouTube, but here's a few lines from Rat Ode.

Because you may be inelegant, simple,
a mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished,
little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall
from the corner of our mouths, but you live
uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco
and fed to fat snakes because you’re not the maze-rat
of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained.

Elizabeth Acevedo is not going to be told what it is OK to write about. Her novel, The Poet X, which won the Carnegie medal in 2019 is the story, told in a series of poems, of 15 year old Xiomara, a Dominican American growing up in New York City. Xiomara has a troubled relationship with her very religious mother and is very close to her twin brother Xavier. She's learnt to defend herself from the unwanted attentions of men. She can use her fists, and she does. She is also a poet who is shy about revealing that part of herself. 

This book has one of the most completely convincing first-person voices that I've come across.  If you want your novel to be about a young person who is a poet you need to be a poet to write the novel. Acevedo is that poet, so the voice is right and the poetry is right and this makes for a powerful and moving book. What's more the book is tightly plotted, the different strands of the story moving towards a climax where poetry, religion, Xiomara's relationship with her mother, her boyfriend, her twin, all come together in a satisfying way.

Maybe, though, just a teeny bit too satisfying for an adult reader. I watched an interview with Elizabeth Acevedo on the publication of her first adult novel Family Lore. It's on an American show called Let's Get Lit, and she said something I found interesting because, as you will know if you've read many of my Carnegie posts, I'm a bit puzzled by the idea of YA fiction and how it differs from A fiction. Here's what she said, talking about that adult novel:

'I think this adult book let me be really expansive in terms of language, in terms of the big questions I wanted to ask. Not that my Young Adult books don't do that, but I think I hold young people more tenderly in a way that—I think I was unflinchingly honest with this book and the things that I was asking.'

You know from the first few pages of The Poet X that, whatever happens, Xiomara is going to be OK. For me, that's a good thing. I like my detectives to be implacable, I like to turn to the end of a tense book to make sure that the protagonist comes out OK. And, to be fair, this isn't all tied up neatly like the end of one of those Shakespeare comedies where everyone gets married. The future here seems likely to have rocky patches, but you kind of know they'll all navigate them safely, and I think this is what Elizabeth Acevedo means when she says she 'holds young people tenderly.' It's not to do with the subject matter or the language, but maybe that 'unflinching honesty' in her adult fiction means that there aren't always going to be happy endings there.

I loved this book, which is unlike anything I've read before, full of memorable images, full of rhythm and life. It may have helped me that I went to a Catholic primary school and was an altar boy for years, so I get all the Catholicism, but the writing is so vivid that I don't think anyone could fail to understand what's going on. 

You can see plenty of Elizabeth Acevedo on YouTube reading her work, and also as a wonderful bonus, she reads the Audible version of the book herself. In any case, once you've heard her performing her poetry you will hear her voice constantly as you read The Poet X.

And so from New York to Yorkshire and the 2020 winner, Lark, by Anthony McGowan. This is, at the moment anyway, my favourite of all the 80-odd Carnegie winners. Lark is the final instalment of the four-part series entitled The Truth of Things but it works just fine as a standalone story. This is another utterly convincing first person voice. Nicky is a teenage boy with an older brother Kenny, who has a learning disability. The relationship between the two boys is at the heart of the book and is beautifully described in direct and simple language and cracking dialogue.

The way Anthony McGowan gives the reader almost the whole of the family's back story in just a couple of pages at the start of the book is masterful. The book opens with a short prologue. Nicky, Kenny and their terrier, Tina, are lost on a moor in the snow, so you know from the start what kind of thing you're in for, and by drawing the reader into the action at once McGowan creates the space for Nicky to explain how they've ended up in this situation, including that all-important family background. 'It wasn't supposed to be like this,' says Nicky. 'It was meant to be a stroll, a laugh. A lark.'

It's not a lark, of course, though the skylark is a central poetic symbol in the story. Anthony McGowan says, in an interview with Peters when the book was shortlisted for the Carnegie, that Nicky is 'a normal kid from a one-horse town in the West Yorkshire Badlands,' and one of the many things I love about this book (and the others in the series), is the way the characters stumble though life, making mistakes, taking wrong turnings (literally in this case) but somehow making it through because they care about, and look after each other. In this story Nicky makes every mistake that someone going out for a walk in the hills could possibly make. The boys set out late with an inadequate map, they ignore the falling snow, hoping for the best. They haven't checked a weather forecast. They have useless clothing and not enough food and drink. Then they try to take a shortcut over a hilltop in terrible visibility.

This is a genuinely terrifying story and it's remarkable that something so gripping and with so many layers is told in such clear, direct language. I kept thinking, this is so great, an eight year old could read it easily. And actually there is so much in it that an eight year old would love, like the discussion about bad language that opens the book:

"I don't bloody like it."

   "Language, Kenny," I said to my brother. "You don't have to bloody well say bloody all the bloody time. It's not clever and it's not funny."

    I copied the whining voice of Mr Kimble, our English teacher. But it was wasted on Kenny, as he didn't go to my school."

    "But it is bloody cold," Kenny said.

Forty-odd years ago we were staying with my parents at Christmas and our four year old daughter went downstairs to the kitchen where my notoriously strait-laced and irascible father was making tea. Her little voice floated up to us as we lay in bed. "Grandad, I'm BLOODY hungry." We'd never heard her say anything like that before, and I'm sure my dad's blood pressure went through the roof. But back to Lark . . .

Passages like the one I just quoted made me realise, firstly, how rare it is to hear people in books for younger children talking in natural language (ie with swearing included) and, secondly, how rare it is in YA fiction to hear the essential childishness of the young adults in question. Kenny, of course, is going to remain childish all his life in many ways, but we can also see that, for all that Nicky takes his responsibility for looking after Kenny seriously, in his playfulness and vulnerability he is still very much a child himself.

Anthony McGowan has commented on the effect that writing for Barrington Stoke had on his writing. On Barrington Stoke's website they say 'Our award-winning short novels are designed to ensure an accessible read for those who struggle and a quick win for more confident readers.' McGowan said about this: 'writing for Barrington Stoke made me focus on the bare bones of what makes us want to read: on character (above all), on the story, on the setting.'

This is the kind of writing I most admire, but the narrative is not entirely unadorned. Anthony McGowan has a great line in similes, the kind of similes that actually tell you how things are, not the clever, showy-off kind. There's the bus driver 'whose face was all screwed up as if he'd just bitten into a bad pie.' Or this: 'Our feet crunched over the snow, making a sound like you were eating biscuits.' The great thing about these images is that, as well as giving you an exact picture of what's happening they also tell you more about the character who's making the comparison.

Lark owes a lot to Barry Hines's famous book, A Kestrel for a Knave, which Ken Loach made into the even more famous film, Kes. Anthony McGowan dedicated Pike to Barry Hines 'who showed us how this might be done.' In Barry Hines's afterword to the 1999 edition of his book he talks about 'the dramatic juxtaposition of industry and nature' to be found in the mining towns of the Midlands and the North. He was often asked (presumably by southerners) how he knew so much about the countryside, coming from a place like Barnsley. Anthony McGowan's books are set in just that kind of place, though today the mines have gone. 

And that reminds me to mention that, in a way, The Truth of Things is a set of historical novels, because the stories are set 'forty years ago.' I guess that's a spoiler because you don't find that out until the end of Lark, and it must say something about the way things still are today that I never wondered when the novels were set until I read the ending.

I'd better go now as I have a lot of Olympics to watch. The Carnegie seems to have passed successfully through its grim period and moved on to something very much more hopeful. I hope that continues.

Where the World Ends - Geraldine McCaughrean's second Carnegie winner - by Paul May

In an interview that you can watch on her website Geraldine McCaughrean described the origin of her book Where the World Ends which won the Carnegie Medal in 2018. Her daughter had visited St Kilda and returned with a head full of anecdotes about the island archipelago, the most remote in the British Isles. One of those anecdotes concerned something that happened in 1727. A small party of boys and men had crossed from the main island, Hirta, to a sea stack called Stac an Armin which is also known as the Warrior Stac, to catch wild fowl. They were ferried across on the island's only boat and expected to be picked up again after three weeks or so. But no one came, and they were marooned there for nine months with no idea why the boat had not returned to take them home.

In fact, as Geraldine McCaughrean says in the interview, this anecdote consisted of only two sentences. No one knows what actually happened on that entirely barren spike of rock during those nine months, other than that eight boys and three men were marooned there and survived. And out of those two sentences and the imagination of the writer came this extraordinary book.

Stephen Hodges / Stac an Armin / 

CC BY-SA 2.0

You can see from the photograph that this is not a comfortable place to spend nine months. The main island of Hirta is just visible in the distance beyond the lumpy shape of Stac Li. It's only four miles away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the planet as far as the marooned boys were concerned. However, the St Kildans were uniquely well-equipped to survive in a place like this. For a start, they were accustomed to live on birds. Here's the book's first sentence:

'His mother gave him a new pair of socks, a puffin to eat on the voyage, and a kiss on the cheek.'

As first sentences go I think that's right up there with Rose Macaulay's opening to The Towers of Trebizond:

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return to High Mass."

I suppose that opening sentence makes sure that anyone who's likely to be upset by the entirely practical attitude of the islanders to birds will not read much further. If they do they will discover that the whole purpose of the expedition to Stac an Armin is to kill as many puffins, gannets, gannet babies (known as gugas), storm petrels and fulmars as possible. This is how the islanders live. The birds are both the staple of the islanders' diet and a valuable trading commodity - the only one they have. This leads to some truly striking images, such as a cave lit entirely by the light from candles made from headless storm petrels with the oil in their stomachs burning.

The re-creation of life on the sea stack is so detailed and realistic that it's hard to believe that the author has never been anywhere near St Kilda, but Geraldine McCaughrean is someone who's accustomed to travel in her imagination, who can turn the facts of the islanders' lives as reported in books into something vividly real, and with that background established, her imagination goes to work on the events.

When a group of boys is marooned on an island the reader naturally thinks of Lord of the Flies, and Where the World Ends was originally going to be a sort of counterpoint to that earlier novel, where the boys from St Kilda would create an island Utopia. What we ended up with is something rather easier to believe in - not the complete breakdown of civilised values that happens in Lord of the Flies, but a kind of intensification of character as the survivors face their own demons and try to deal with the enmities and conflicts and friendships that inevitably develop in such a situation.

The children in Lord of the Flies were children as we would recognise them today, accustomed to all the trappings of civilisation—shops, comfy beds, clean clothes, baths and showers . . . The boys in this story, growing up on St Kilda in the early part of the 18th century are actually young men. They've passed the initiation test that allows them to go birding on the cliffs, walking out onto an exposed splinter of rock and bending down to touch their toes. This birding is hard and dangerous work, and while the boys may be physically young, and still missing their mothers and dogs and homes, they are not like the children we know today. They work to stay alive, both back on Hirta and here on Stac an Armin. But both men and boys share one childlike attribute. They have an absolute, literal belief in God and heaven and angels, and in the words of the Bible, and they are ready to believe almost any well-told story. Little Euan, 'soulful, solemn little Euan whose voice had not broken yet, and who said colours had tastes, and that holy words were magic,' has what seems to be a kind of fit one evening. He cries out that he knows what has happened, 'they are all gone up.' And everyone, men and boys alike, is prepared to at least half-believe him. He is saying that the last day has come, the day of judgement, and the angels have taken up everyone in the world, everyone on Hirta, but have been unable to find the birders on the barren sea stack so they have been left behind. After all, what else could have happened?

The central character in this book is Quilliam, or Quill. A name like a bird and feet like a bird's feet—as with all the islanders his feet are adapted to climbing the cliffs. In so many ways the St Kildans are like the birds that keep them alive, and Quill has a strange, half mystical connection with a great auk (garefowl) which frequents the rocks. When, in one of the book's many dramatic scenes, Quill falls from a cliff while attempting to rescue Mr Farriss, the depressed and suicidal schoolmaster,  Geraldine McCaughrean says this:

'Every Kilda man is part bird, because he knows how it feels to plummet out of the sky towards the brightness of the sea. He has seen it in his imagination a thousand times over. He has known friends and kin who spent the last moments of their lives making that plunge.'

Quill is a storyteller. He has words, and he has acquired more words from a visitor to Hirta, Murdina Galloway, the beautiful niece of Mr Farriss. She has told him stories of a world with trees. She has sung 'lullabies and laments and love songs' that 'sent shudders through the minister'. 'She even carried words around with her - there were never fewer than two books in her pockets.' Quill is, of course, in love with her, and his visions of her support him in his isolation. Quill's stories support the other boys, but he's cast out of the upper cave by Col Cane, the island's sexton and Minister's assistant who has appointed himself as a stand-in Minister on the fowling expedition. Quill is accused of consorting with a sea-witch by the sea's edge. The 'witch' was the great auk. Quill takes shelter in the lower cave (there's not much shelter there) and one by one the other boys secretly defy Col Cane for the sake of Quill's stories.

Thirty years before this book won the Carnegie, Geraldine McCaughrean had won with A Pack of Lies in 1988. That book, too, was about the power of stories and was a kind of sampler of different literary styles—a cleverly linked collection of short stories. In Where the World Ends we have another book about the power and importance of stories, but this time those stories are woven seamlessly into a larger narrative. They are part of that narrative and they comment on it. There are many layers of meaning here—and just as many sources of reading pleasure because this book is so beautifully written. The combination of action and vivid description is wonderful:

'No one with a morsel of sense moves about the cliffs at night. But Quill did. He slid and scrambled downwards, hoping to meet Farriss or Don and plead for help. But they were nowhere in sight. The sky was seeded with birds - some furtive, fearful breed that only flew home after sunset. They sped inshore so fast that they seemed to hurl themselves into extinction against the solid rock.'

I opened the book at random to choose that quote. I could have opened it to any page and found something just as good. I love that reference to extinction that just helps to remind us that the great auk that is so lovingly depicted in this book will be extinct not much more than a hundred years later.

Mike Pennington / Great Auk
 (Pinguinis impennis) specimen,
Kelvingrove, Glasgow / 

CC BY-SA 2.0

There's only one previous Carnegie winner who wrote anything comparable to this, and that's William Mayne. I mention him here, despite his ultimate disgrace and imprisonment, because I see so many echoes of his work in Geraldine McCaughrean's. He set his stories in far-flung places, as well as in his native Yorkshire, and wasn't afraid to create with his imagination places and societies he had never seen himself. He wrote books that were idiosyncratic and sometimes difficult, but always beautifully written. And his books were hugely influential on children's literature, especially in the UK. It's not Mayne's Carnegie winner A Grass Rope that is closest in feel to what Geraldine McCaughrean has done here. I'm thinking more of stories of survival like Antar and the Eagles, where a small boy is abducted by eagles and brought up by them, or Drift, where a boy wanders away from a settlement in North America and thinks he's being pursued by Native Americans, who are really trying to keep him safe.

But where William Mayne could be difficult, Geraldine McCaughrean is most definitely not. Where the World Ends is a tremendously readable adventure story that transports the reader to a world most will never experience directly. It has tragedy and humour, thrills and moments of silent meditation. There is far more in it than anyone will pick up on a single reading. I've just read it twice and I will certainly read it again. This is one of the best of the many Carnegie winners and deserves to be considered a classic of children's literature.

I love gannets. There isn't much that's more thrilling than watching gannets fishing, diving into there sea at 100kph. But recently avian flu has been causing terrible losses in gannetries around Scotland. I've just been reading Kathleen Jamie's new book, Cairn, which I recommend. Well, I'd recommend anything she's written. Here's part of a piece about the Bass Rock, 'the greatest gannetry on earth.'

'Last winter it (avian influenza) was on the Solway, killing migrant geese. This year it hit the Bass at peak breeding time. There is drone footage of gannets lying dead on their nests, next to chicks and partners. They're hanging dead from the cliffs, floating dead on the water. They're washing up dead on the beaches, all down the coast. Not only the Bass, but the other gannetries too: Noss and Hermaness, Sula Sgeir, Stac Li and Stac an Armin, Ailsa Craig. These colonies are ancient - who knows when they were established.' 

That was in 2022. There are some signs that the colonies may be starting to recover, but it's too soon to tell. Back in 1727 those men and boys thought the birds were provided by God for their use. Like the herring they could be harvested for ever and they'd keep coming back. Now we know different. And the devastation of those gannet colonies provides a clue to what happened on St Kilda three centuries ago. The population there recovered, but life became impossible in the twentieth century and the last St Kildans left the island in 1930. Here to end are some of Scotland's gannetries. Last summer we also visited a gannetry in Brittany where we learnt the French name for these birds— Fou de Basson.

The Bass Rock
(zoom to see a sky full of gannets
and the stairway to the lighthouse)

Fair Isle

Hermaness

Michael Powell made a movie based on the evacuation of St Kilda. It's called The Edge of the World and was filmed on the island of Foula in 1936. Powell had been dreaming of making this film since he'd first heard of the evacuation five years before but, having secured the funding to make the film, he was denied permission to film on St Kilda. Foula is 200 miles northeast of St Kilda, and west of Shetland. It's very remote, but is still inhabited today. You can watch a great little documentary about the making of the film for free on BFI here. BFI also have a free film of gannets feeding in Lerwick harbour in 1946. It's a must for gannet lovers! The Edge of the World is also on BFI but you need a subscription to watch it.

Paul May's blog/book pages

Keeping Grief Away by Paul May

I read a lot of fiction. SF, thrillers, detective fiction, literary fiction, all kinds of stuff. In none of it do I find rape, murder, genocide and war occurring so regularly as in the Carnegie Medal winners I've been reading in the last few months. This month I've read Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman, 2015 winner (rape, lynching, murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, American Civil War, Indian Wars) and Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys, 2017 winner (rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, maritime disaster with thousands of deaths, WW2). Did I enjoy them? Not really. Is enjoyment even an appropriate response to these novels? Well, probably not. Are they children's books? No. So why, then, are they not adult books? (Not that that is even a category). The subject matter is at least as extreme as most adult fiction that I read. I'm beginning to suspect that an important distinguishing feature of YA fiction is that it lacks complexity. I know that's a ridiculous over-simplification, but it does relate to Mal Peet's comment that he didn't like YA because he thought it was 'condescending'. And by complexity I mean complexity of meaning, of ideas, and not simply a complicated plot.

Both these books are the result of extensive research and Tanya Landman has been very clear in interviews about the danger of allowing the research to show through in a novel like this. I'm not sure she entirely succeeds in stopping that happening, but young readers would learn a lot from this book, and indeed many reviews say just that: I learned a lot. The quality of the writing will no doubt pull readers through to the end, although the plot devices which link the whole, slightly rambling story together do feel a bit clunky. But then, I recently re-read Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens and the plot of that well-respected novel creaks even more. But Dickens is a writer who uses symbolism and metaphor to deepen the effect of his stories. In Our Mutual Friend the River Thames runs through the book both concealing and revealing the dead and the living. There are people who seem to be dead but are alive, people who are alive but pretend to be dead. There is layer upon layer of meaning, whereas Buffalo Soldier is essentially a simple, linear story whose theme is freedom. Simplicity is not necessarily a bad thing, and complexity is to be found even in picture books for the very youngest children, but I'm just trying to figure out why books with such adult subject matter, books about adults who aren't even all that young, end up being marketed to a specific age range rather than to all adults. 

My greater difficulty with the book, however, was with Landman's decision to tell the whole story in the first person in the voice of Charley O'Hara, a newly-freed slave girl. That bothered me, not because of cultural appropriation but because it undermined my trust and made me question the character's authenticity. I think I might have been OK with it if this had been a third-person narrative. Then the author wouldn't have been pretending to be the character, there would have been opportunities for other points of view and there could have been a certain authorial distance. I have no problem with authors writing about characters with different race, ethnicity or gender from themselves, but the first-person narrative here made the novel less effective than it might have been.

While I was reading about white people writing black characters the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris came to mind. I fished out my 1883 copy of this book and then started reading about Harris on the Internet before realising that a) Harris is a controversial figure (I think I already knew that) and b) Harris's Uncle Remus stories have been incredibly influential both on children's fiction and on the wider literary world. They are also a perfect focus for discussions about cultural appropriation. Alice Walker, for example, wrote a piece called Uncle Remus, No Friend Of Mine. She grew up in the same town as Harris and said, 'he stole a good part of my heritage.' All this is too much for this post, but I'll return to the subject once I'm done with the Carnegie.

My reservations about Salt to the Sea were similar in some ways to those about Buffalo Soldier I can only admire the vast amount of research that went into this book, and its intent to inform readers about the 'worst disaster in maritime history' in which about 9,000 people died when torpedoes from a Soviet submarine sank an overloaded passenger vessel carrying refugees from Eastern Europe away from the advancing Soviet troops. I was also very grateful for the maps on the endpapers. But I found the narrative structure of the book incredibly irritating. We have four parallel first-person narratives. One character tells a tiny part of their story, usually in just a few pages, then the next character takes over, then the next and the next, then back to the first character again. This never varies and it wore me out. 

As for the characters and the plot, well, there was good and very bad. Alfred, a German sailor, is an almost complete caricature whose dreadful skin condition mirrors his corrupt and revolting soul. And there is a slightly Dan Brown-ish plot strand about the fabled 'Amber Room.' The two female characters, Emila and Joana, are more rounded and convincing, and all the characters are linked by the idea that each of them has a secret. I can see that when you're telling a story where every reader knows that the characters are going to get on a boat and the boat is going to sink, you're going to have to do something to preserve the narrative tension, so we have those secrets and the 'Amber Room' and of course we have a love story. But really, that love story is a bit of a damp squib. It is certainly not Leo and Kate on the Titanic.

If you want a book about war and genocide in the 20th century I recommend reading Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. It has stuck in my mind  for over 30 years since I first read it, but while I remembered vividly the book's extraordinary climax I had completely forgotten that one of the major characters was a writer of Young Adult fiction. She's called Circe Berman and writes Judy Blume-like books under the pseudonym Polly Madison. Her books are good, by the way. Paul Slazinger, a literary novelist and friend of the narrator thinks they are 'the greatest works of literature since Don Quixote'. Others aren't quite so sure. Librarians, teachers and the grandparents of teenagers suggest that they are 'Useful, frank and intelligent, but as literature hardly more than workmanlike.' Kurt Vonnegut's view on the matter remains a mystery. 

Bluebeard is a very funny and complex book about grief and how we deal with it, and it served to remind me that there has been a certain earnestness and lack of humour in many of these grim Carnegie winners I've been reading, so it is with considerable relief that I turn to One by Sarah Crossan, which won the Carnegie in 2016.

This novel about conjoined twins is funny, moving and startlingly unsentimental. This is another first-person narrative (I read somewhere not so long ago that this is one of the identifying features of YA literature) but in this case I wasn't at all bothered by a young Irish writer imagining herself into the body of Grace, one half of the pair of twins. I wondered why this was and I think the answer is twofold. First, Grace does not speak with any kind of an accent. She is simply herself, articulate and vivid. 

'We take the train home/ with Jon/ and pretend we can't hear all the words around us/ like little wasps stings.'

Jon says he can't imagine what it's like for them.

'"It's like that,"' Tippi tells him/ and points at / a woman across the aisle with a phone/ aimed at us like a sniper rifle.'

I should have mentioned that this novel is written in a kind of blank verse. I had my doubts about this, since at first glance it did at times seem more like prose written out in a different way, but the technique quickly grew on me especially because it gave the writer so much scope for different kinds of emphasis. It was beautifully easy to read. And actually, now I think of it, it's reminiscent of Vonnegut's style, splitting the narrative into very short sections. It also leaves space for the reader's imagination to fill, literal space on the page, but also space in your head.  The book has 430 pages but barely 30,000 words of text, which is very short for a YA novel these days. 

So, why was I never for a moment worried that this was a book based on research by an author writing about a situation of which she had no direct knowledge. Well, it's because Sarah Crossan makes her characters live. Or rather, her characters in this book live for me in a way that the characters in the books I discussed earlier didn't, for me. There's just as much research gone into One as into Buffalo Soldier or Salt to the Sea, but the book isn't only about the ethical dilemmas confronting conjoined twins and their parents and medical practitioners when they have to consider separating the twins. This story is about Grace and Tippi, about who they are, about how they deal with life and death, about how they relate to the people around them. In Buffalo Soldier and in Salt to the Sea I felt I was being educated about the American West, about WW2. I always felt the characters were secondary to the mission. One is a remarkable feat of imagination from Sarah Crossan. I loved it, and have no intention of spoiling your enjoyment by telling you any more about it. Just read it, if you haven't already.

But to return to WW2, as the list of Carnegie winners has so frequently done. J G Ballard reviewed Bluebeard when it was first published and said this about Kurt Vonnegut:

'For Vonnegut, the most significant events in his life seem to have been his experiences as a captured American soldier during the Second World War, which formed the core of Slaughterhouse 5, and some moment, presumably during the 1960s, when he realised that the next generation had learned nothing from the tragedies of the war, and had even begun to lose all sense of its own past, that great casualty of American culture.' (The Guardian 22nd April 1988)

We're a few more generations down the line from the 1960s now and there's no sign of humanity learning any lessons. If Buffalo Soldier and Salt to the Sea help to remind this generation that we need to do things differently they will indeed have been useful. I don't think Vonnegut would have been optimistic about the prospect of that happening. His (fictional) solution to the problem of how to make human beings behave better was to have us evolve, a million years into the future, into furry seal-like creatures with flippers and small brains who can't do much harm to anyone or anything. That's in his 1985 novel, Galapagos.

In the mean time Vonnegut has some things to say about 'keeping grief away'. Here is Circe Berman, the YA author whose husband has recently died and who has been keeping Rabo Karabekian company over the summer, but is now returning home:

'I asked her if she would write. I meant letters to me, but she thought I meant books. "That's all I do—that and dancing," she said. "As long as I keep that up, I keep grief away." All summer long she had made it easy to forget that she had recently lost a husband who was evidently brilliant and funny and adorable.

"One other thing helps a little bit," she said. "It works for me. It probably wouldn't work for you. That's talking loud and brassy, and telling everyone when they're right and wrong, giving orders to everybody: Wake up! Cheer up! Get to work!"'

Pau May's blog/book pages are here. 

The Sense of an Ending by Paul May

Yes, I am getting close to the end. This month I read Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner, the 2013 Carnegie Winner, and The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks from 2014. Neither book did much to cheer me up, even though both are about the human spirit in the face of adversity. Both books (spoiler alert) end in death, and in the case of The Bunker Diary (even more spoiler alert) everyone dies.

I found things to admire in both books. In Maggot Moon Standish Treadwell is a wonderful creation and his relationship with his friend Hector is touching and beautifully drawn. But the future dystopian world where Standish lives—or is it a 1950s world where the Nazis won the war?—that world seems to me very like the unconvincing stage-set the authorities of Motherland have built to fake a moon landing. There's not much to it—a street, a school, a housing estate and a weird building. It's like a TV series that's been shot on a very tight budget. What's very real is the extreme violence—a teacher beating a small boy to death, critics of the regime with their tongues torn out. 

And I wondered if The Bunker Diary is meant to be a metaphor for life. Is there a suggestion that although we imagine ourselves to be free we are really all in prison, locked in a bunker from which the only escape is death? Maybe. 

Once again I find myself thinking about the long shadow WW2 has cast over the Carnegie, though Kevin Brooks's bunker seems more likely to be an enhanced relic of the Cold War. How long is it before historical events fade from our memories? We no longer talk much about the Crimean war or the Boer War, though now the legacies of slavery and imperialism have returned with a vengeance. But the experience of reading and thinking about these two books has left me feeling depressed. Carnegie winners in the 2010s started grim and got steadily grimmer. I don't know, because I haven't read a lot of new children's fiction in the last few years, whether these winners reflect a general trend in children's literature. The winners were chosen by librarians, who do read widely among current publications, so I have to think that they are in some ways representative of what's going on. I'm hoping things will look up in the final ten years. There'll be a new winner in a couple of months time so I thought I'd look at the shortlist, and I got sucked in to looking at the judging criteria.

I found out some things. Here, for example, is why a non-fiction book is unlikely to win the Carnegie again:

'The whole work should provide pleasure, not merely from the surface enjoyment of a good read, but also the deeper subconscious satisfaction of having gone through a vicarious, but at the time of reading, a real experience that is retained afterwards.' (From the Yoto Carnegie website, 2024)

The criteria are listed under the headings of Plot, Themes, Characterisation and Style. They appear to be specifically and only designed for the evaluation of fiction. No mention is made of non-fiction, though verse is mentioned, but it's hard to see how a non-narrative verse collection could win. And the list of questions judges are supposed to ask about the books reminded me of the kind of criteria used to make National Curriculum assessments in Literacy. 

It all makes me wonder how true is this statement, also on the Carnegie website: 'All categories of books, including poetry, non-fiction and graphic novels, in print or e-book format, for children and young people are eligible.'

There are awards for children's non-fiction but it appears that the Carnegie itself is, in reality, an award only for fiction, whether in prose or verse. It might be better if it called itself the Carnegie award for fiction and had done with it.

Just in case this all sounds a bit too gloomy, I have as usual been leaping ahead in my reading and can report that there is at least one book published in the last decade that ranks with the very best, so there's that to look forward to!

As In The Long Ago my blog/website

Four More Carnegie Winners by Paul May

So, here we are in the 1990s and we're starting to see more and more books about 'Issues'.

In 1991 Berlie Doherty tackled teenage parenthood, and you might say that in 1992 Anne Fine was in the same territory, although while Flour Babies touches on some of the same issues as Dear Nobody it's also funny and poetic and beautifully constructed. It absolutely avoids any kind of preaching and I love the way the words and tune of an old song are woven into the final third of the book and contribute to its transformative climax. This book has a tremendous final paragraph and I do love a good ending. It's a shame I can't quote it but that really would be a spoiler.

Then in 1993 as a complete contrast there was Stone Cold by Robert Swindells, a bleak book with a central character who is all victim and has no agency whatsoever, and apparently no hope. It's a book, almost a documentary, about teenage homelessness, dressed up as a thriller about a serial killer preying upon homeless youths in London. I once wrote quite a grim book myself, all about death and stuff. My editors told me I needed to leave the readers with some hope at the end and I did try, but they still didn't publish it. Someone published this, though, and it has been much used in schools. It's not a book I would have ever wanted to read, but it has a good number of positive reviews on Amazon from young readers. I wonder if its grimness makes them feel glad they still have a roof over their heads? It is, without doubt, a cautionary tale.                                                                                                       

Theresa Breslin's 1994 winner, Whispers in the Graveyard is an 'Issue' book too, the result of a conscious decision by its author to write about dyslexia and its impact. But as Theresa Breslin says on her website '... no point wittering on about dyslexia without a good going tale. Without a "story" the book would be that Solomon goes to school, has a rough time, comes home, has a rough time. So what?' 

Well, quite. In Stone Cold, Link (the central character) has a rough time at home so he goes to London where he has a rough time, then a rougher time in Camden. At the end of the book he thinks he might try Covent Garden where I'm pretty sure he'll have a rough time. Robert Swindells' answer to the potential lack of narrative drive was to add that parallel story about a serial killer, but the serial killer is a kind of Marvel comics character and the element of caricature sits uneasily with the 'realism' of the street scenes. 

Whispers in the Graveyard, on the other hand, feels like a completely organic melding of horror and realism, and when you read what Theresa Breslin says about the book's creation you can see why: "It meshed together unlike anything else I've ever known - the solitary grave, Solomon's father, the stories, the presence of evil inside everyone, the power of words, the infinite resource of the human mind, - it all came together."

It is a brilliant book - I read it when it came out, and it is still just as good today. And it is, I should mention, only the second Scottish book to win the Carnegie. It contains no easy answers, and has completely convincing school scenes, great dialogue and genuinely chilling horror. And it has a great ending! It's funny how often people talk about the beginnings of books and how seldom about the endings, but I guess it's the spoiler element at work. I might get around to doing a top ten of Carnegie winners' endings one day. I already know the worst ending though - it's from The Exeter Blitz by David Rees:

"You sound like some pansy poncy poet. What are you talking about?"

"Exeter. It's a place worth talking about."

I shudder every time I read that, and I haven't spoilt a thing by telling you about it.

Got to say, I've never understood
these back to front dust jackets.

And so to the 1995 winner, Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, the first volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Is there anything to say about this that hasn't been said? I re-read it this month and one thing I did notice was the pace of it. It rattles along like a good thriller - you're straight into the action on page one and it never lets up. In fact, it's amazing how short some of the episodes are, like Lyra's stay in Mrs Coulter's flat, and how quickly the action moves from the boats of the Gyptians to the voyage to the North, to the armoured bears . . .

I remember hearing Philip Pullman describe how the idea of the daemons came to him. It's an extraordinary and brilliant idea, and clearly it's the one most people fix on, but I think it's the storytelling that's the key to the book's enormous success. And even though I think that the story loses focus somewhat in the third volume of the trilogy, the ending, with Will and Lyra separated forever, redeems the whole thing. We always used to say when I played in a band that there was nothing so important as getting the ending right. Do that and the audience would forget all the mistakes you'd made earlier, and it's the same with stories. Not that I'm saying Philip Pullman made mistakes, but I got a bit lost in all those battles in The Amber Spyglass and all those Angels and Spectres . . .

As I'm sure everyone knows, Philip Pullman had a lot of harsh things to say about CS Lewis's Narnia books, and about his adult science fiction too. As in: "I loathe the Narnia books, and I loathe the so-called space trilogy, because they contain an ugly vision." (Interview with Huw Spanner for Third Way magazine, 2002). The irony is that I've always felt that those very works by CS Lewis are major influences on Pullman's own creation. Pullman does say in the acknowledgements at the back of The Amber Spyglass, "I have stolen ideas from every book I've ever read," but I don't know whether he's ever specifically acknowledged his debt to Lewis. I'm thinking particularly of the world of the mulefa which Mary Malone enters, and which, in feel, reminded me very much of Lewis's Perelandra - and isn't the idea of moving between worlds through a kind of portal very similar to the way you reach other worlds in the Narnia books?

That Huw Spanner interview is here, and it's excellent. Among other things Pullman is insistent that his overriding concern is to tell a story and is completely open to the idea that there might be artistic flaws in his book. As he says in the interview: "Artistic perfection is not achievable in anything much over the length of a sonnet."

Perhaps that's why I still think Clockwork is his best book. It's short, perfect in every detail and perfectly complemented by Peter Bailey's illustrations. I also like Lyra's Oxford, a delightful miniature add-on to the main His Dark Materials trilogy.

Northern Lights is that rare thing, a Carnegie winner that enjoyed enormous commercial success. And in case you weren't aware, the initial print run was small, so a first edition is worth a lot of money. I told a friend of mine this, who was a children's librarian, and she said she had all three books - signed first editions. She sold them at auction for a lot of much needed cash and then went into a bookshop to order a set of hardbacks to replace them. The assistant told her kindly that she didn't need to spend all that money on hardbacks as they were now available as paperbacks. 

So take a look on your bookshelves. You never know!