“A powerful and highly imaginative graphic novel.” GUARDIAN
“Stories on the page are so beautifully neat. All that lovely black print; those lovely straight lines and paragraphs and pages. But stories are living things, creatures that move and grow in the imaginations of writer and reader. They must be solid and touchable just like the land, and must have fluid half-known depths just like the sea. These stories take place in a real world – the streets in which I grew, the fields and beaches over which I walked. People I know appear in them. But in fiction, real worlds merge with dreamed worlds. Real people walk with ghosts and figments. Earthly truth goes hand-in-hand with watery lies.
ALSO BY DAVID ALMOND
The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon
The Boy Who Swam with Piranhas
Clay
Counting Stars
The Fire-Eaters
Heaven Eyes
Kit’s Wilderness
Mouse Bird Snake Wolf
My Dad’s a Birdman
My Name Is Mina
The Savage
Secret Heart
Skellig
Slog’s Dad
The Tightrope Walkers
The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
First published 2014 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Introduction and story introductions © 2014 David Almond
“Slog’s Dad” © 2006 David Almond (First published in So, What Kept You?)
“May Malone” © 2008 David Almond (First published in The Children’s Hours)
“When God Came to Cathleen’s Garden” © 2009, 2010 David Almond
(First published in Sideshow: Ten Original Tales of Freaks, Illusionists and Other Matters Odd and Magical)
“The Missing Link” © 2008, 2014 David Almond (First published in The Times)
“Harry Miller’s Run” © 2008 David Almond (First published in conjunction with Great North Run Culture)
“Half a Creature from the Sea” © 2007 David Almond (First published in Click)
“Joe Quinn’s Poltergeist” © 2014 David Almond
“Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads” © 2009 David Almond (First published in Free? Stories Celebrating Human Rights)
Illustrations © 2014 Eleanor Taylor
The right of David Almond and Eleanor Taylor to be identified as author and illustrator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-6114-8 (ePub)
www.walker.co.uk
David Almond, Half a Creature From the Sea: A Life in Stories
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