NEW NOVEL
CREATURE OF THE NIGHT by Kate Thompson
Newly published by Random House Children’s Books in the UK and is receiving impressive reviews. See some of the great reviews below!
[Kate Thompson] has woven a truly modern tale with a timeless theme. Totally absorbing and utterly beguiling, it is all done with a remarkable lightness of touch. Books such as this don’t come around very often.
- THE GUARDIAN
Creature of the Night is a riveting read from page one. Thompson’s remarkable skills are brilliantly evident: both in her depiction of Bobby’s family, inner-city Dublin and her vivid and totally convincing evocation of rural Ireland. Where ordinary and supernatural meet is Thompson territory and they have never been explored so effectively or handled so well. This is an absolutely terrific book, Kate Thompson’s best. And that’s saying something. I could not fault it.
- THE IRISH TIMES
Fairy-tales, like much else in children’s lives, have received a make-over of late. Harder, sharper and more sinister than those that gambolled across Western consciousness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream they have become more technologically advanced in Eoin Colfer’s riotous Artemis Fowl series, more sexually predatory in Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely and more subversive in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men. All of which is tremendous fun for readers of over 9, but Kate Thompson’s Creature of the Night is something teenagers shouldn’t miss because it goes to the heart of our lingering superstitions concerning the Little People. Thompson is an Irish children’s writer of dazzling talent and inventiveness, who is very much an all-or-nothing talent whom bright children either love or loathe at first sight. She won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award for The New Policeman, a captivating comedy about our perceived lack of time. However, the quirkiness of novels such as Switchers and Only Human have made her seem more eclectic than she is. Creature of the Night is what should bring her a much wider audience; my 15 year old kept shoving it under my nose with notes saying YOU MUST READ THIS. For a start, it’s horribly funny. Bobby, the narrator, has been moved by his ma from Dublin to the countryside. His horrified reaction, which not even the promise of a new Xbox can soften, is amplified by his leaving behind a life of minor but increasingly violent crime, “a fighting unit, an oiled machine” under the control of Fluke. Desperate not to vegetate with his maddening little brother Dennis and his impoverished, slatternly mother, Bobby actually mends the abandoned Skoda left by the last tenant, who has disappeared. But then his little brother starts talking about a tiny playmate, an old woman who comes through the dog-flap, for whom food must be left out. Is he imagining it? What is the tragedy that nobody will talk about, and why is it bad luck not to leave milk out for the fairies? The truth can’t be revealed without spoiling a tremendous twist involving murder, but Thompson’s magical voice has reached new heights of comedy, and new depths of humanity in a strikingly original and gripping piece of fiction.
- THE TIMES
The Whitbread, the Guardian, the Irish Book Awards, the CBI/Bisto Award… Kate Thompson, the Yorkshire writer who lives in the West of Ireland, has won every award going for her ground-breaking teenage novels. Her new book, Creature of the Night, looks set to add another prize to her collection. A gripping, highly original piece of work, it’s that rare thing, a perfectly crafted page-turner. Bobby’s running wild in Dublin – joyriding, stealing on the streets, getting high. His mother decides to move the family to a rented house in the country, a house where a child was murdered and from where the previous lodger, Lars, has mysteriously disappeared. When Bobby discovers Lars’s journal, full of notes about fairy folk and their ability to change shape, he becomes convinced that something very strange is going on in the house. His younger brother keeps talking about a little woman who visits him at night, climbing in through the cat flap; and Bobby spots a badger running away from the house. Thompson seamlessly blends a gritty, urban tale of disaffected youth with a chilling tale of the supernatural. Her writing is a joy, sparse, direct, yet lyrical. But most of all it is Bobby’s extraordinary journey, his growing awareness of how his life is, and how it could be, that is so affecting. It is, ultimately, a tale of redemption. Creature of the Night is the best teenage book I’ve read since Roddy Doyle’s Wilderness…
- THE IRISH INDEPENDENT