Clay

Clay is a novel for young readers by the English writer David Almond, published in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and longlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

The book is narrated by Davie, an altar boy in a northern English town whose ordinary life of church, school and skiving off is interrupted by Stephen Rose, a boy who has come to live with his aunt and uncle and has a talent for making figures out of clay. Father O'Mahoney asks Davie to be friendly with him, and the two of them work together on a sculpture of a boy, which Stephen insists can be given life. Almond writes the book in the first person and keeps the ordinary details of the town in place, so the supernatural arrives inside a world of confession, bicycles and playground fights, and the questions the two boys are asking are about creation and responsibility as much as about fear.

Almond had written Skellig a few years earlier, and this book belongs to the same territory: children in working-class settings meeting something that may or may not be possible.