Bloomsbury Children's Books

cell had been used to house old furniture in need of repair and was cluttered, but dry and relatively clean. Rather than make him wait while they emptied it completely, they'd left a few pieces behind. A cracked washtub, a rickety table, and my old bed with the broken leg weren't much, but they were more than most prisoners had.

who would telephone me whenever my little children moved

I was never entirely sure how many flats there were in the house, nor how many of them were occupied.

Coraline sighed. ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?’

I’d wanted to write a story for my daughters that told them something I wished I’d known when I was a boy: that being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.

‘It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline,’ said Coraline.

wasn’t the kind of rain you could go out in, it was the other kind, the kind that threw itself down from the sky and splashed where it landed.

it smelled like something very old and very slow.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.’

Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she had met made any sense