The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book was published simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2008, and it is built as a set of linked stories about a boy growing up in an unusual place rather than as a single continuous plot. Neil Gaiman has said the structure follows Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, with each chapter standing as an episode and the final chapter gathering the whole, and the book's central idea is a childhood lived in a place that is safe but not permanent.

Bod's childhood is bounded by rules. He cannot leave the graveyard without permission, the ghosts can teach him things that were useful when they were alive, and his guardian Silas, who is neither alive nor dead, is the one who brings him food and books from the outside. Each chapter takes him further out of the safe circle: into the crypts, into the memory of a witch buried at the boundary, into the town school, and finally into the confrontation with the man who has been waiting for him to become findable. The graveyard's inhabitants are drawn as a community with its own history, which is what keeps the book from being a single supernatural joke.

The novel won both the Carnegie Medal in Britain and the Newbery Medal in the United States, the first time a single book took both awards, and it also received the Hugo Award for best novel. It has been adapted as a graphic novel and optioned for film, and it is the second of Gaiman's books for younger readers, after Coraline, and the one that reads more like a companion to childhood than a warning about it.