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| photo: Sara Jane Palmer | |
This is a lucky year for fans of David Almond, British author of the award-winning Skellig (1999), the Printz-winning Kit's Wilderness (2000), the masterful The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean (2014) and many more splendid novels. In 2015, U.S. readers will get to enjoy three new YA titles by Almond.
Almond's books all share a distinctively dreamlike, atmospheric style, steeped in the land- and seascapes of his childhood in Felling-on-Tyne in northern England, and exploring themes that blur dreams and reality, past and future, the living and dead, the extraordinary and the ordinary. But as v-p and publisher of Delacorte Press Beverly Horowitz once told Shelf Awareness, each book feels fresh: "It's very much about not only David's creative energy but his own history, where he comes from, the life he led, his religious questions, his sense of the bigger picture in the world." Horowitz added, "There's no easy answer to any of the things he's exploring, and I think as he writes a new book they're still in his head. It's all part of the David Almond inner quest to understand the world."
The Tightrope Walkers (Candlewick, March 24, 2015) stars a boy named Dominic Hall, the son of a shipbuilder in a river town in northern England, who wants to be a writer but hopes that's not too snobby a dream. This poetic, powerful novel was met with a constellation of starred reviews, including one from Shelf's former editor Jennifer M. Brown, who wrote, "Almond's magnetic narrative conveys the sounds and heat of the shipyards, the smells of the circus tent where Dom and Holly see the tightrope walkers, the quality of the light at sunset after a satisfying day. And he tells of the tightrope humans walk between social divides, sanity and insanity, faith and doubt, friendship and sex, what we're born to, what we can rise above--and what traps us."
Half a Creature from the Sea: A Life in Stories (Candlewick, September 22, 2015) is a collection of eight illustrated short stories set in Almond's hometown, each prefaced with some autobiographical context. "These stories take place in a real world--the streets in which I grew, the fields and beaches over which I walked," Almond explained in the introduction. "But in fiction, real worlds merge with dreamed worlds. Real people walk with ghosts and figments. Earthly truth goes hand in hand with watery lies." In the story "May Malone," May might have a monster she keeps in her house, or it might just be local whispering. In "Slog's Dad," a boy's father might be visiting the town square... from Heaven. And he might be hungry for a big sandwich with gravy.
Readers will meet the poetry-obsessed 17-year-old Claire Wilkinson in A Song for Ella Grey (Delacorte, October 13, 2015), Almond's contemporary riff on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Claire is in love with her friend Ella Grey, but Ella Grey is seduced by Orpheus, an alluring boy who wanders around northern England in a purple coat and Doc Martens, playing the lute on beaches to smitten dolphins and humans alike. It's an ode to the mad joy of youth, mortality and love. On love: "It's stronger than anything, Claire," says Ella Grey. "It's what keeps the sea flowing, what keeps the stars shining, what keeps us all alive." --Karin Snelson, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness