The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman
Summary
A man named Jack murders a family in their house one night. The toddler, who has climbed out of his cot and wandered off, escapes up the hill and through the gates of an old graveyard, where the dead take a vote and decide to raise him. They name him Nobody Owens, Bod for short.
He grows up there over eight chapters, each set a couple of years apart. He is taught letters from the headstones and Fading from the ghosts. His guardian, Silas, is neither living nor dead, leaves the graveyard to fetch food, and is quite clearly a vampire without the book ever saying so. Bod meets a witch buried in unconsecrated ground, gets himself into serious trouble in a ghoul gate, briefly attends a school, and makes one living friend.
The man Jack is still looking for him, and cannot enter the graveyard, and will not stop.
Gaiman took the structure from The Jungle Book, with a graveyard for the jungle, and it holds up as an entirely original book. It is written for children of about ten and up, and adults read it constantly. It is genuinely frightening in places and the ending, which is about a boy having to leave the only home he knows, is quietly devastating.
The dead are the warmth of it. Mr and Mrs Owens, who have wanted a child for two centuries. Miss Lupescu, who seems a cold substitute guardian and turns out to be something else entirely. Liza Hempstock, the witch, who wants a headstone and is owed one.
The rules are strict and well used: Bod has the Freedom of the Graveyard, which lets him see in the dark and walk through walls inside the gates, and none of it works outside them.
Around three hundred pages, episodic, illustrated in most editions by Dave McKean and Chris Riddell, and unusually easy to read aloud a chapter at a time.
Best for readers of any age who want a ghost story that is fundamentally about being raised well by people who will have to let you go.
Historical Context & Significance
The Graveyard Book won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 2009 Newbery Medal and the 2010 Carnegie Medal, and it is the only book ever to take both the Newbery and the Carnegie, the leading American and British awards for children's literature. It also won the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book.
Winning the Newbery and the Hugo in the same year put Neil Gaiman in the unusual position of being honoured by the children's librarians of America and by the World Science Fiction Convention for one book.
The structure is a deliberate answer to Kipling's The Jungle Book, which Gaiman has said he began thinking about after watching his young son cycling among gravestones near their home. The idea sat unwritten for more than twenty years because he did not think he was good enough yet.