The baby is named Nobody Owens, since Mrs. Owens, the ghost who first discovered the baby and her husband, Mr. His mother, as a ghost, asks them to protect the child, and they argue about whether to do this until the Lady on the Grey (implied to be the Angel of Death) appears and states 'The dead should have charity'. The child crawls out of the house and up a hill to a graveyard where ghosts find him. Unknown to him, the toddler has climbed out of his crib to explore. The story begins as the man Jack murders three members of a family but fails to kill the youngest child, a one-and-a-half-year-old boy. Some chapters have analogues to Rudyard Kipling's 1894 work for example, the chapter 'The Hounds of God' parallels the story ' Kaa's Hunting'. Each of the eight chapters is a short story, each set two years after the preceding chapter.

Throughout his adventures, Bod learns supernatural abilities such as Fading (allows Bod to turn invisible, but only if no one is paying attention to him), Haunting (which allows Bod to make people feel uneasy, though this ability can be amplified to terrify them), and Dreamwalking (going into others' dreams and controlling the dream, though he cannot cause physical harm). The bulk of the book is about the protagonist's adventures in and out of the graveyard in which he lives as he grows up. Recalling how comfortable his son looked there, Gaiman thought he 'could write something a lot like The Jungle Book and set it in a graveyard.' When he sat down to write, however, Gaiman decided he was 'not yet a good enough writer' and came to the same conclusion as he revisited it every few years.

Gaiman first had the idea for the story in 1985, after seeing his then-two-year-old son Mike 'pedaling his tricycle around a graveyard' near their home in East Grinstead, West Sussex.

Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time. It was the first time in the award's 30-year history that one book made both the author and illustrator shortlists. Ĭhris Riddell, who illustrated the British children's edition, made the Kate Greenaway Medal shortlist. The Graveyard Book also won the annual Hugo Award for Best Novel from the World Science Fiction Convention and Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book selected by Locus Magazine subscribers. Gaiman won both the British Carnegie Medal and the American Newbery Medal recognizing the year's best children's books, the first time both named the same work. The Graveyard Book traces the story of the boy Nobody 'Bod' Owens who is adopted and reared by the supernatural occupants of a graveyard after his family is brutally murdered. The Graveyard Book is a young adult novel by the English author Neil Gaiman, simultaneously published in Britain and America in 2008.

The graveyard book genre