My Dad's a Birdman

Two Plays

The Tale of Angelino Brown

The Forgotten Sisters

I Was a Rat

Hilary McKay's Fairy Tales

Fork-Tongue Charmers: The Luck Uglies

Paola Santiago and the Sanctuary of Shadows: Paola Santiago

From master storyteller David Almond comes a gripping, exquisitely written novel about a hidden-away child who emerges into a broken world.

Billy Dean is a secret child. He has a beautiful young mother and a father who arrives at night carrying the scents of candles and incense and cigarettes. Birds fly to his window. Mice run out from his walls. His world is a carpet, a bed, pictures of the holy island, and a single locked door. His father fills his mind and his dreams with mysterious tales and memories and dreadful warnings. But then his father disappears, and Billy’s mother brings him out into the world at last. He learns the horrifying story of what was saved and what was destroyed on the day he was born, the day the bombers came to Blinkbonny. The kind butcher, Mr. McCaufrey, and the medium, Missus Malone, are waiting for him. He becomes The Angel Child, one who can heal the living, contact the dead, bring comfort to a troubled world. But there is one figure who is beyond healing, who comes looking for Billy himself — and is determined on a kind of reckoning.

Discover Your Child's Next Read

My Dad's a Birdman

David Almond, Polly Dunbar, 2007

Two Plays

David Almond, 2005

The Tale of Angelino Brown

Alex T. Smith, David Almond, 2017

The Forgotten Sisters

Shannon Hale, 2015

I Was a Rat

Philip Pullman, 1999

Hilary McKay's Fairy Tales

Hilary Mckay, Sarah Gibb, 2017

Fork-Tongue Charmers: The Luck Uglies

Pétur Antonsson, Paul Durham, 2015

Paola Santiago and the Sanctuary of Shadows: Paola Santiago

Tehlor Kay Mejia, 2022