Product details
- ISBN 9781849411455
- Weight: 150g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 29 Sep 2009
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Is there a barrier that divides the dark unknown from the everyday world around us?
If so, is it broken sometimes by the dead returning, by the undead, or by alien creatures?
What else could account for the chance meeting (or was it?) between a young student and hitch-hiker who turns out to be so much stranger than she seems? Why else should three successive crews flying a Second World War bomber - Blackham's Wimpey - be driven to madness, despair, even to death, though the plane returns from each mission without a scratch? Who are Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou; the figments of Peter's imagination that become a real life nightmare for Roger and Biddy?
There is St Austin Friars, too: a church without a congregation - until a burial service, oddly arranged a month ahead, is attended by a sinister assortment of the living and the dead. And Sergeant Nice, an ordinary policeman in an ordinary seaside town faced with a series of quite extraordinary thefts; the work surely, of no human hand.
Chilling, but often humorous as well, these stories creep up on you and take you by surprise.
Robert Westall was born in 1929 on Tyneside, and he grew up there during the war. He went to the local Grammar School and then studied Fine Art at Durham University, and Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He worked as an art teacher in Cheshire and for the Samaritans.
His first novel for children, The Machine Gunners, published in 1975, was an instant success and was awarded the Carnegie Medal. His books have been translated into ten languages, dramatised for television and he won the Carnegie again in 1982 for The Scarecrows, the Smarties Prize in 1989 for Blitzcat, and the Guardian Award in 1991 for The Kingdom by the Sea. Between 1986 until his death in 1993, he devoted himself to his writing.
