Less than a week now, and I have 18 copies of David Almond’s Skellig at hand to give away on World Book Night 2015. I first read the book as an undergraduate, on a module created by Professor David Rudd, then of University of Bolton, now of University of Roehampton. The module (Children’s Literature 1945 to present) reading list, from memory, included: E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Louis Sachar’s The Holes, Skellig, and a couple of others I can’t quite remember.
Skellig is such a beautiful read, full of mythology, riddled with Blake, and it clutches at that most primitive of human drives – the gut-wrenching need to forge a bond with an other.
“Love is the child that breathes our breath / Love is the child that scatters death”
the textual silence project... 