The Tightrope Walkers
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- £1.99
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
The Tightrope Walkers by David Almond - a novel of young love and tragedy from the prizewinning author of Skellig
'I was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne...'
Dominic Hall grows up in the sixties on a brand-new estate, along with the other families who escaped the river. But the Tyne is still an overwhelming presence, and most of the fathers work in the shipyards. Dom is torn between his new mates: Holly Stroud, his enchanting neighbour, and Vincent McAlinden, who's something else altogether - a wild, dangerous boy with murderous instincts.
After his mother's death, Dom has to decide who he is, what he wants to be - and then face up to the consequences.
Deeply moving with a unique narrative voice, The Tightrope Walkers will be loved by fans of Roddy Doyle, Irvine Welsh and Ross Raisin, as well as readers familiar with David Almond's masterful novel The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean, and the hugely popular Skellig.
'Almond is a master storyteller' Independent
'Not only dramatically and emotionally suspenseful, it is also vividly drawn and wonderfully well-paced, as we might expect from a master storyteller' John Burnside on THE TRUE TALE OF THE MONSTER BILLY DEAN, Guardian
David Almond is the author of Skellig and other novels and plays for adults and children. He has won many prestigious awards including the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2010, the Carnegie Medal and two Whitbreads. His first novel for adults, The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean was published in 2011.
He was born in Newcastle, grew up on Tyneside and now lives with his family in Northumberland.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a powerfully realistic bildungsroman from award-winning author Almond (The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean), Dominic Hall, the son of a working man from Newcastle, seems destined for greater success than was possible for his ill-educated and often angry father. It's the late 1960s, and the times are definitely changing. Though Dom "was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne, as so many of us were back then," his quick mind has opened up to him a wider world of ideas and the chance to be the first in his family to attend college. Like good and bad angels on either shoulder, however, are his friends, Holly Stroud, an eccentric child of the middle-class, and Vincent McAlinden, an incorrigible and sometimes frightening troublemaker who shares the Halls' blue-collar background. Dom is drawn in opposite directions by these two as he negotiates a difficult, sometimes dangerous world. Almond's characteristic penetrating writing and finely drawn characters are on full display in a story more fully grounded in a specific and important historical moment than anything he has published heretofore. Ages 14 up.