A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls is a novel for young adults by the American writer Patrick Ness, published by Walker Books in 2011. It is set in England in the present day, and it was illustrated by Jim Kay.

Conor is the boy at the centre of it. His mother is ill with cancer, he is being bullied at school, and the adults around him are dealing with the situation in ways that leave him on his own with it.

At night a monster comes to him and tells him stories. The monster is not a friendly visitor and does not console him; what it wants from Conor is the thing he cannot admit, which is what he is really feeling about his mother's illness.

The idea for the book came from the writer Siobhan Dowd, who was terminally ill with cancer when she thought of it and who died before she could write it. Ness wrote the novel from her idea, and he and Jim Kay won the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2012, the only book to have won both.