The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond

Billy Dean is born in the town of Blinkbonny, just outside Alnwick, the day the bombs explode razing his town and plunging his country into war. He grows up knowing only the walls of the tiny flat where he and his mother live, and the face of his father who is an occasional visitor, preaching hellfire and teaching his son Bible stories. At the age of 13 his mother takes him out into the post apocalyptic landscape of rubble for the first time and he becomes a phenomenon, can speak to the dead and heal the living. As his father returns and the truth of his birth and the reasons he was shut away come to light the narrative comes to a climax involving redemption and the holy island of Lindisfarne.

Almond has written almost the entire book in Dean's own demotic, a sentence structure that is coherent and complex but often childlike, and words written phoenetically much as a 7 year old child would write. This makes it perhaps a little harder to read but also compelling and with a sense of authenticity as a boy who was shut away from the world for 13 years, knowing nothing of rivers, bombs, hills, wind or rain struggles to narrate his own history