Boneland

ALAN GARNER was born in Congleton in Cheshire in October 1934. He was brought up on Alderley and lives with his wife and family, between Congleton and Alderley.Alan Garner’s writing was Highly Recommended for the only international children’s book award, The Hans Christian Andersen Medal, in 1978. He was also awarded the twelfth annual Children’s Literature Association International Phoenix Award for his novel The Stone Book and by extension, of course, for the entire Stone Book Quartet. In 2001, Alan was awarded an OBE for his services to Children’s Literature, despite admitting that he doesn’t write for children – they just understand his books best.

‘From Harry Potter to The Hunger Games, adults have been enthusiastically been reading children’s books over recent years. Garner predates the cross over phenomenon by decades, but he has never been just a children’s writer: he’s far richer, odder and deeper than that’ Guardian‘He deploys short, accurate words better than anyone else writing in English today, and he makes it look simple. Boneland is the strangest, but also the strongest of Garner’s books. It feels like a capstone to a career that has taken him, as a writer, to remarkable places, and returned him to the same place he started, to the landscape of Alderley Edge and to the sleepers under the hill’ The Times‘Boneland hooks into the mind, haunting, provoking…This novel functions like a dream, containing hints at insights that, once we wake, we yearn to grasp again’ Telegraph‘There is much left unexplained. However, this is a novel for all the children who loved ‘The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen’ but who have now grown up.’ Four out of Five stars. Sarah Kingsford, Express