This is a powerful addition to his highly distinctive works. David Almond is also winner of the 2010 Hans Christian Andersen award.Īs readers will expect from David Almond, there's a sense of inhabiting a strange, vivid world that exists alongside the familiar, and an evocation of wonder in everyday things as well as in the extraordinary. And indeed, Joe's dreams are already stalked by a tiger, so real that his skin and its pelt begin to feel as one.Ī stunning novel from the author of the modern children's classic Skellig - winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Book Award. She tells Joe, 'In the circus there is a secret heart ' - a place of contained wildness where the barriers between the human and animal world are fluid. Into Joe's unhappy world comes Hackenschmidt's Circus, and with it the strangely familiar Corinna. Joe's friend, Stanny, insists that Joe must toughen up, become a survivor - and he is adamant that a weekend in the wilderness with Stanny and his Uncle Joff will do the trick.

His days are spent trying to evade the demands of school and the taunts of the local bullies.

Joe lives with his mother in Helmouth, a forgotten village crumbling on the edge of the suburbs. A moving, mysterious and spiritual story from an extraordinary writer. But into his world comes the circus, and Corinna, and a tiger. Joe Maloney is out of place in this world: his mind is always somewhere else - on the weird creatures he sees around him and whispers he hears on the air.

Clay by david almond summary