Listen to the Moon

Listen to the Moon is a children's novel by the English writer Michael Morpurgo, published in 2014 by HarperCollins to coincide with the centenary of the First World War. Its starting point is the sinking of the liner Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, and it is set in the Scilly Isles in the years of the war.

Alfie Wheatcroft lives on the island of Bryher with his parents and his uncle, in a household that makes its living from fishing and farming while German submarines patrol the water offshore. One morning he skips school and goes out with his father after mackerel, and they row across to an abandoned island where Alfie thinks he can hear crying.

In a pest house on that island, built long before to quarantine sailors who arrived with disease, they find a girl clutching a teddy bear, and she cannot tell them her name or where she has come from. The rest of the novel is about the family that takes her in, the islanders who are not all willing to, and the slow recovery of a story that begins with a ship.