In this dark and powerful collection, David Almond presents a series of 'living' stories inspired by his childhood that capture the imagination. In his words: '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 fluidhalf-known depths just like the sea. These stories take place in the real world - the streets in which I grew, the fields and branches over which I walked. People I know appear in them. But in fiction, realworlds merge with dreamed worlds.

Real people walk with ghosts and figments. Earthly truth goes hand-in-hand with watery lies.'.