Goodnight Mister Tom
First edition
|
|
| Author | Michelle Magorian |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Angelo Renaldi |
| Genre | Children's historical novel |
| Publisher | Kestrel Books |
|
Publication date
|
1981 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
| Pages | 304 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 9987640 |
| LC Class | PZ7.M275 Go 1981 |
Goodnight Mister Tom is a children's novel by the English author Michelle Magorian, published by Kestrel in 1981. Harper & Row published an American edition within the calendar year. Set during World War II, it features a boy abused at home in London who is evacuated to the country at the outbreak of the war. In the care of Mister Tom, an elderly recluse, he experiences a new life of loving and care.
Magorian and Mister Tom won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award judged by a panel of British children's writers. She was also a commended runner up for the Carnegie Medal from the British librarians, recognising the year's best English-language children's book published in the UK.
The novel has been twice adapted as a musical, once as a play and once as a film, Goodnight Mister Tom (1998). In 2003, the novel was listed at number 49 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. The most recent theatrical adaptation, Goodnight Mister Tom won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment.
In September 1939, as Britain stands on the brink of the war, many young children from the cities are evacuated to the countryside to escape an imminent German bombardment. Willie Beech, a boy from Deptford who is physically and emotionally abused by his mother, arrives at the home of Tom Oakley, a widower in his sixties who lives in the village of Little Weirwold. The boy is thinly clad, underfed and covered with painful bruises, and believes he is full of sin, a result of his upbringing by his domineering, insane, God-fearing mother.
...
Wikipedia