Conor is still lying awake just after midnight when the monster calls. It stands outside his window and tells him it has come to get him. It shakes his house until the pictures fall off the walls.
But he isn’t afraid of the monster. After all, he’s got bigger things to worry about: his mum’s cancer treatments have started again, his domineering grandmother wants him to move in with her, and his dad is in America with his new family. Not to mention the nightmares he keeps having… the ones he wakes up from screaming. Those are the things that really scare him.
So when the monster announces he’s going to tell him three stories, Conor is less than impressed. What could tales of princes and witches possibly have to do with his life?
A Monster Calls began as an idea from the late Siobhan Dowd, the Carnegie Award-winning author of Bog Childand Solace of the Road. When she passed away in 2007, Patrick Ness (pictured above) took over from Dowd’s notes and spun it into a tale of his own – and what an amazing tale it is! Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy is perhaps my favourite series of all, so I approached A Monster Calls with equal parts trepidation and excitement. This was a different territory than the epic dystopian story that began in The Knife of Never Letting Go, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
I should never have doubted the product of these two wonderful writers, because A Monster Calls is simply breathtaking. You’ll pick it up and keep reading it until the last page, and even then it will stay with you for a long time afterwards. The ink-splattered black and white illustrations from Jim Kay are somewhat like a Rorschach test, and suit the mood of this sombre yet uplifting tale perfectly.
This is definitely a book to get excited about, and I can see it garnering lots of awards, with good reason. If you’re looking for a book that will keep you engrossed until the very end, look no further than A Monster Calls. Holly Harper, Readings Review
I’m Patrick Ness. I claim three states in America as my home : I was born in Virginia, my first memories are Hawaiian, and I went to high school in Washington. Then I lived in California for college (at USC) and moved to the United Kingdom in 1999, where I’ve lived (mostly in London) ever since.
I’ve written nine books: 2 novels for adults (The Crash of Hennington and The Crane Wife), 1 short story collection for adults (Topics About Which I Know Nothing) and 6 novels for young adults (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men, A Monster Calls, More Than This and The Rest of Us Just Live Here).
For these books, I’ve won the Carnegie Medal twice, the Costa Children’s Book Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Red House Book Award, the Jugendliteratur Preis, the UKLA Award, the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the fabulous, fabulous, fabulous Jim Kay also won the Greenaway for his illustrations in A Monster Calls.
I write screenplays as well, including for the movie version of A Monster Calls starring Liam Neeson, Sigourney Weaver and Felicity Jones.
https://patrickness.com/about-me/
A thrilling new trailer for Patrick Ness's award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy, which is made up of The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and now the final, heart-pounding instalment, Monsters of Men.
The bestselling novel about love, loss and hope from the twice Carnegie Medal-winning Patrick Ness.
Conor has the same dream every night, ever since his mother first fell ill, ever since she started the treatments that don't quite seem to be working. But tonight is different. Tonight, when he wakes, there's a visitor at his window. It's ancient, elemental, a force of nature. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth.
Patrick Ness takes the final idea of the late, award-winning writer Siobhan Dowd and weaves an extraordinary and heartbreaking tale of mischief, healing and above all, the courage it takes to survive.
GoodReads