Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a 2011 fantasy novel by the American writer Ransom Riggs and his debut. It tells its story through a combination of prose and old photographs, which Riggs gathered from collectors and used to build the characters and the scenes around them.

Jacob Portman grows up on his grandfather's stories about an island orphanage and the strange children in it, and after the old man dies he travels to Wales with his father to see the place for himself. The home is real, the children are still there, and they live inside a loop that repeats a single day, which keeps them safe from creatures that hunt people like them, and which they cannot leave without losing one another.

Riggs uses the found photographs as evidence inside the fiction, so the reader sees the children before they are described, and the horror comes from how ordinary those pictures look. The book was followed by further volumes, and it gave the sequence its founding device.