Family Tree

Mal Peet was a multi-award-winning novelist best known for his young adult fiction, including Keeper, Tamar, and Life: An Unexploded Diagram. His novels were nominated for and won several awards including the Carnegie Medal, the Branford Boase Award, and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. In 2017 his final novel Beck was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Mal passed away in 2015.||Emma Shoard is an illustrator and printmaker who graduated in 2011 from Kingston University’s Illustration & Animation course. She also works part-time as a bookseller for Daunt Books. Emma has twice been longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal for her work on Siobhan Dowd’s The Pavee and the Buffer Girl and Mal Peet’s The Family Tree.

"I love this wonderful book. How does Mal Peet do so much in such a short space? It's engrossing, haunting, beautifully written." – DAVID ALMOND"For some time now, Mal Peet has been the most elegant prose stylist in the world of young-adult fiction…one of the best novelists, full stop" – ANTHONY MCGOWAN"It's likely to be the best children's book you will read this year … Peet is a profound storyteller and this haunting, moving story – sensitively illustrated by Emma Shoard's atmospheric ink drawings – reminds us what riches he left behind and what treasures we are missing." THE TIMES (CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE WEEK)"Engrossing, haunting and beautifully written" – David Almond"Emotional truth and tenderness … Told in simple language and illustrated with muted loveliness" – The Sunday Times"Wonderful writers like Mal Peet don’t need hundreds of pages or thousands of words to write a story that packs a unforgettable punch …Poignant and moving" – South China Morning Post