Kit's Wilderness by David Almond

When 13 year old Christopher, known as Kit, Watson, comes to live in the ex mining town of Stoneygate he is coming to a land where his roots run deep. His paternal grandmother has died and he and his parents have relocated from Newcastle to take care of his elderly grandfather. As he comes to terms with life in a small village his grandfather shows him the local landmarks, where the mines lie under the ground leaving hollows and humps scarring the landscape.   He tells him tales of the pits and his time working there, of the ghost known as Silky, a benign spirit who haunted the mines, of the ponies and children sent to work and die and lost beneath the earth.

As Kit adjusts to life as the new boy at school and is befriended by the volatile charmingly wild Allie he watches the village children play in the Wilderness, an area of wasteland with a collapsed pit entrance at its heart.  He is approached by John Askew, a morose dark haired boy who challenges him to undertake a frightening game.  Known as Death Askew only invites the children of the oldest families of the village to play, it is a game that establishes a deep bond between two boys of the same age but with such different upbringings. As Kit's grandfather takes Kit to see the monument in the church graveyard to children lost in Stoneygate's 1821 mining diaster he reads off his own name, that of Askew and relects on the ghosts that he is beginning to see around him.

But now with the waning of the year Kit's grandfather begins to slip away from the family, little by little disappearing into a blankness from which he is slower and slower to return. As Stoneygate dips towards midwinter Kit's relationships with Askew and Allie come to a head beneath the earth.

A wonderfully moving book, Almond at his best telling a deceptively simple compelling story. By telling it from Kit's point of view, a boy who is a natural storyteller with a vivid imagination, we are given an unreliable narrator, that is, we can't be sure if what he says is true, but it becomes clear that the concept of 'truth' does not matter. Almond has woven a masterful narrative about the power of stories, of ghosts and the power of the past and a the ability of place and history to reach out and affect the present.