A Monster Calls

But Conor is mistaken, it isn’t the monster he’s been expecting, the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming…

This monster is in his back garden, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild.

And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth.

A book about stories and myths, about courage and loss and the fear of loss, A Monster Calls is storytelling at its richest, most essential and best.

Twice Carnegie Medal-winning Patrick Ness spins a tale from the final idea of much-loved Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself, beautifully illustrated by Jim Kay.

Darkly mischievous and painfully funny, A Monster Calls is an extraordinarily moving novel of coming to terms with loss from two of our finest writers for young adults, and the only book to win both the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal.

‘I felt – and feel – as if I’ve been handed a baton, like a particularly fine writer has given me her story and said, “Go. Run with it. Make trouble.”… And now it’s time to hand the baton on to you. Stories don’t end with the writers, however many started the race. Here’s what Siobhan and I came up with. So go. Run with it.
Make trouble.’ – Patrick Ness

‘Compelling … powerful and impressive.’ - Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials

‘Electrifying.’ – The Telegraph

‘Brave and beautiful, full of compassion, A Monster Calls fuses the painful and insightful, the simple and profound. The result trembles with life.’ – Independent

Taking his characters – and readers – everywhere from the depths of consciousness to other worlds and further, to worlds beyond death, Patrick Ness is one of the most startlingly original and thought-provoking contemporary writers. His mantelpiece must already be groaning under the weight of his many awards; accolades that include the Carnegie Medal (which he’s won twice), the Costa Children’s Book Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Red House Book Award and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. His novels include the bestselling trilogy Chaos Walking, More Than This, The Rest of Us Just Live Here and The Crane Wife.