From master storyteller David Almond comes a gripping, exquisitely written novel about a hidden-away child who emerges into a broken world.
Billy Dean is a secret child. He has a beautiful young mother and a father who arrives at night carrying the scents of candles and incense and cigarettes. Birds fly to his window. Mice run out from his walls. His world is a carpet, a bed, pictures of the holy island, and a single locked door. His father fills his mind and his dreams with mysterious tales and memories and dreadful warnings. But then his father disappears, and Billy’s mother brings him out into the world at last. He learns the horrifying story of what was saved and what was destroyed on the day he was born, the day the bombers came to Blinkbonny. The kind butcher, Mr. McCaufrey, and the medium, Missus Malone, are waiting for him. He becomes The Angel Child, one who can heal the living, contact the dead, bring comfort to a troubled world. But there is one figure who is beyond healing, who comes looking for Billy himself—and is determined on a kind of reckoning.
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“Billy’s ability to
find surreal beauty in strange things, such as the dead mice he lovingly
dissects in his room, hearkens back to Almond’s treatment of Skellig and Heaven Eyes, and the message is also similar: wonder and loveliness
can be recovered from the ashes of the festering evil. Billy’s innocence doesn’t
save him from that evil, but his steadfast ability to find goodness, beauty,
love, and mystery in the darkest places lights the way forward, for himself and
readers alike.”
—
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books