Mark Haddon – författare

OVER TEN MILLION COPIES SOLDThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other.The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.'Outstanding...a stunningly good read' Observer'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwanWinner of the Whitbread Book of the Year**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear LifeSimultaneously heart-breaking and darkly hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult.Mark Haddon's parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least Mark had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. And it’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood.As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.'I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being' Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

From the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time comes a novel about families and secretsTwo families. Seven days. One house. Angela and her brother Richard have spent twenty years avoiding each other. Now, after the death of their mother, they bring their families together for a holiday in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks.But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours. Once again Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother, has written a novel that is funny, poignant and deeply insightful about human lives.

'Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them'This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are also no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On the other hand, he knows all the countries in the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7507. When Christopher decides to find out who killed the neighbour's dog, his mystery story becomes more complicated than he could have ever predicted.BACKSTORY: Meet the author and learn about the background to Christopher's story.

OVER TEN MILLION COPIES SOLDThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other.The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.'Outstanding...a stunningly good read' Observer'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwanWinner of the Whitbread Book of the Year**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Shakespeare’s Pericles is transformed by Mark Haddon into a vivid, breathtaking adventure that zooms between antiquity and the present day. A motherless girl grows up in isolated luxury, hidden from the world by her wealthy father. She believes their life together is normal – but as time passes, she has a growing sense that something between them is very wrong.She cannot escape, so she seeks solace in her books. Her favourite tales are those that conjure ancient worlds – of angry gods and heroic mortals, one of whom will some day come to her rescue.Soon, she will forget where the page ends and her mind begins.‘Just downright brilliant... a transcendent, transporting experience’ Observer‘A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery’ Max PorterSHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets - for both Christopher and the rest of his family.

Polar Bears is a captivating tale by award-winning writer Mark Haddon. Balancing humour and pathos, it tells of one man's struggle to love, support and live with someone suffering from a psychological condition. With an elliptical structure and teasing timeline, the play handles the subject sensitively, with vivid, sympathetically-drawn characters and nicely-balanced dialectics. Polar Bears is thought-provoking and intelligent, with echoes of Nietszchean philosophy, and it refuses to offer any easy answers for those embroiled in mental instability. The plot is as follows: John has never met anyone like Kay. When the moon is in the right phase, she is magnetic and amazingly alive. But when the darkness closes in, she is lost to another world, a world in which John does not belong. Mark Haddon is a hugely celebrated writer who is best known for his 2003 novel The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time, which won a string of prestigious awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year. It quickly became an international bestseller, was printed in 32 countries and translated into 15 languages.Polar Bears is his first work for the theatre and enjoyed a high profile premiere at the Donmar Warehouse 1 April - 22 May 2010, directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Jodhi May and Richard Coyle.

This schools' edition of Mark Haddon's multi-award-winning novel adapted for the stage of the National Theatre by Simon Stephens is perfect for Key Stages 3 and 4. Featuring the play script from the Modern Plays edition but with the language adjusted for school use*, this edition includes a wealth of classroom activities for the English and drama classrooms.Christopher, fifteen years old, stands beside Mrs Shears's dead dog. It has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight, and Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in the book he is writing to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington. He has an extraordinary brain and is exceptional at maths, but he is ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. He has never ventured alone beyond the end of his road, he detests being touched and he distrusts strangers. But Christopher's detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that turns his world upside-down.This educational edition in Methuen Drama's Critical Scripts series has been prepared by national Drama in Secondary English experts Ruth Moore and Paul Bunyan. Building on a decade of highly effective work and publications endorsed by national organisations and supported by teachers and consultants across Britain, each book in the series: > meets the requirements at KS3 and GCSE> features detailed, structured schemes of work utilising drama approaches to improve literary and language analysis > places pupils' understanding of the learning process at the heart of the activities > will help pupils to boost English GCSE success and develop high-level skills at KS3> will save teachers considerable time devising their own resources.Simon Stephens's adaptation of Mark Haddon's bestselling, award-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time offers a richly theatrical exploration of this touching and bleakly humorous tale.* The instances of stronger language have been tempered in this edition specifically for school use. Teachers may still wish to satisfy themselves that it is suited to the age of their pupils.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols, a review quiz and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

That Mark Haddon's first book after The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was a poetry collection perhaps came as a surprise to his legions of fans; that it is a collection of such virtuosity and range did not. The gifts so admired in Haddon's prose are in strong evidence here too - the humanity of his voices, the dark humour and the uncanny ventriloquism - but Haddon is also a writer of considerable seriousness, lyric power and surreal invention, and The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea combines bittersweet love-lyrics, lucid and bold new versions of Horace, comic set-pieces, lullabies, wry postmodern shenanigans (including a note from the official board of censors on "18" certificate poetry), and an entire John Buchan novel condensed to five pages. Consolidating Haddon's reputation as our most powerful myth-weavers and spell-makers, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea also confirms him as one of the most outrageous and freewheeling imaginations at work in contemporary literature.

‘Just downright brilliant... a transcendent, transporting experience’ ObserverA motherless girl grows up in isolated luxury, hidden from the world by her wealthy father. She believes their life together is normal – but as time passes, she has a growing sense that something between them is very wrong.She cannot escape, so she seeks solace in her books. Her favourite tales are those that conjure ancient worlds – of angry gods and heroic mortals, one of whom will some day come to her rescue.Soon, she will forget where the page ends and her mind begins.‘A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery’ Max Porter

The bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time weaves ancient fables into fresh, unexpected forms and forges new unforgettable legends.'A marvel of a collection' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time‘A consummate storyteller’ New York TimesThe myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth is turned into a wrenching parable of maternal love – and of the monstrosities of patriarchy.The lover of a goddess, Tithonus, is gifted eternal life but without eternal youth.Actaeon, changed into a stag after glimpsing the naked Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about how humans use and misuse animals.From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon showcases how we are subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks, as he reimagines stories from Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit to St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert.'In sentences as precisely cut as paper sculptures, Mark Haddon fits ancient myth to the cruelties and wonders of the present' Francis Spufford, author of Cahokia Jazz

'Tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written ... Simply glorious, from start to finish' Rachel Clarke, author of Dear LifeSimultaneously heart-breaking and darkly hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult.Mark Haddon's parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least Mark had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It’s about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It’s about family. It’s about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. And it’s richly illustrated throughout with images from the author’s childhood.As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.'I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being' Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

Boom! Is a roller-coaster read with spaceships, spies and mortal danger!Jim and his best friend Charlie weren't looking for adventure, when they decided to bug the staffroom . . . But then they overhear their teachers speaking in a secret language and it's too late to turn back. And now they have to explain to the police, the headmistress and their parents where they've been for a whole week - without mentioning the aliens.

Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets - for both Christopher and the rest of his family.

Ben's in danger of spending his holidays cooped up in a caravan with his mad Aunt Gwen. But by luck (and bribery), he gets a place on the school trip to an outward-bound centre in Wales, along with Barney, Jenks and of course, Agent Z. Abseiling, orienteering, sinking enemy canoes and sabotaging toothpaste are all in a day's work for the Crane Grove Crew. But then they uncover a news clipping which reveals that their centre manager, the affectionately nicknamed 'Grenade-head', is in fact an escaped bank robber. He's planning to recover the buried loot any night now and Agent Z and the crew intend to be there when he does. If you think that sounds like a downright ridiculous plan, you'd be right. Especially as the escaped criminal story turns out to be the invention of the crew's new pal, Roz and for once, the joke's on them! Mark Haddon has a sharp understanding of what makes children tick, and they will delight in the ever more daring, ever more hilarious missions of Agent Z and his three creators.

The first collection of stories from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Porpoise.'Terrifically compelling' GuardianA seaside pier collapses. An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong. A thirty-stone man is confined to his living room. One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Another woman is saved from drowning. Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox. A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle. A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve.'The real redemption in these superbly gripping stories comes from their canny human detail, and the vivid, unsettling clarity they bring to our lives’ Sunday Times

Fifteen year old Christopher is about to embark on an investigation...Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them.It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears' house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead.This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are also no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On the other hand, he knows all the countries in the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7507. When Christopher decides to find out who killed the neighbour's dog, his mystery story becomes more complicated than he could have ever predicted.'Outstanding... a stunningly good read' Observer'A superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy' Ian McEwan**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

'A marvel of a collection' Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time‘A consummate storyteller’ New York Times'There is nothing more terrifying than the monster that squats behind the door you dare not open...'The bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time weaves ancient fables into fresh, unexpected forms and forges new unforgettable legends.The myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth is turned into a wrenching parable of maternal love – and of the monstrosities of patriarchy.The lover of a goddess, Tithonus, is gifted eternal life but without eternal youth.Actaeon, changed into a stag after glimpsing the naked Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about how humans use and misuse animals.From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon showcases how we are subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks, as he reimagines stories from Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit to St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert.'In sentences as precisely cut as paper sculptures, Mark Haddon fits ancient myth to the cruelties and wonders of the present' Francis Spufford, author of Cahokia Jazz

‘Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark and everyone sailing under a different sky’Where do you go if you can’t feel at home in your own family? When the people who made you can’t fathom who you become? In these three tales of quarrelling clans and fraught reunions, Mark Haddon shows family in its frank, unsparing yet frequently absurd light, and, in doing so charts a stormy course into the crucible of the self.Selected from The Pier Falls, The Red House and A Spot of Bother.VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanDiscover the in the Vintage Minis ‘Head Space’ series:Recovery by Helen MacdonaldTherapy by Stephen Grosz

Fifteen-year-old Christopher has a photographic memory. He understands maths. He understands science. What he can't understand are other human beings.When he finds his neighbour's dog, Wellington, lying dead on the lawn, he decides to track down the killer and write a murder mystery about it. But in doing so, he uncovers other mysteries that threaten to bring his whole world crashing down around him.