He's a tramp, to all intents and purposes, remarkable only for the fact that beneath his greasy jacket is folded a pair of tatty wings. This is Skellig: crotchety, arthritic, addicted to Chinese takeaway ("food of the gods!") and brown ale ("sweetest of nectars!"). dead bluebottles scattered on his hair and shoulders". Poking around one day in the garage at the back of the house, he finds, amid the clutter of tea chests and rotting rolls of carpet, a skinny, pale, black-suited creature, "covered in dust and webs. His family have moved into a filthy, falling-down house on the far side of town, and his parents are distracted by his newborn sister, who is troublingly ill.
It tells the story of Michael, a 10-year-old boy whose easy life has been turned on its head. "I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon," begins the novel, which would go on to win the Whitbread children's book award, the Carnegie medal and the sort of awed encomiums normally reserved for literary greats.
I dropped the manuscript in the postbox, turned away, and bang! Skellig was there." "I wasn't thinking of anything I was planning to take a few days off. D avid Almond had just posted a collection of stories to his publisher when the opening sentence of Skellig popped into his head.
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