Andrea has picked "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman as our September book.
Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good
heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to
help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk.
His small act of
kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are
people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them.
And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness,
monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to
the London that he knew.
"A fantastic story that is both the stuff of dreams and nightmares" (
San Diego Union-Tribune), Neil Gaiman's first solo novel has become a touchstone of urban fantasy, and a perennial favorite of readers everywhere.
Amazon.com Review
Neverwhere's protagonist, Richard Mayhew, learns the hard
way that no good deed goes unpunished. He ceases to exist in the
ordinary world of London Above, and joins a quest through the dark and
dangerous London Below, a shadow city of lost and forgotten people,
places, and times. His companions are Door, who is trying to find out
who hired the assassins who murdered her family and why; the Marquis of
Carabas, a trickster who trades services for very big favors; and
Hunter, a mysterious lady who guards bodies and hunts only the biggest
game. London Below is a wonderfully realized shadow world, and the story
plunges through it like an express passing local stations, with plenty
of action and a satisfying conclusion. The story is reminiscent of
Douglas Adams's
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Neil Gaiman's humor is much darker and his images sometimes truly horrific. Puns and allusions to everything from
Paradise Lost to
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz abound, but you can enjoy the book without getting all of them. Gaiman is definitely not just for graphic-novel fans anymore.
--Nona Vero
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Neil Gaiman was born in Hampshire, UK, and now lives in the United
States near
Minneapolis. As a child he discovered his love of books,
reading, and stories, devouring the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien,
James Branch Cabell, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K.
LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, and G.K. Chesterton. A self-described "feral child
who was raised in libraries," Gaiman credits librarians with fostering a
life-long love of reading: "I wouldn't be who I am without libraries. I
was the sort of kid who devoured books, and my happiest times as a boy
were when I persuaded my parents to drop me off in the local library on
their way to work, and I spent the day there. I discovered that
librarians actually want to help you: they taught me about interlibrary
loans."
Neil Gaiman is credited with being one of the creators of modern comics,
as well as an author whose work crosses genres and reaches audiences of
all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one
of the top ten living post-modern writers and is a prolific creator of
works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and
drama.
Gaiman wrote the screenplay for the original BBC TV series of
Neverwhere (1996); Dave McKean's first feature film,
Mirrormask (2005), for the Jim Henson Company; and cowrote the script to Robert Zemeckis's
Beowulf. He produced
Stardust, Matthew Vaughn's film based on Gaiman's book by the same name.
MORE AT
http://www.neilgaiman.com/About_Neil/Biography
