A Box of Nothing

Peter Dickinson

ISBN 10: 9992188901 ISBN 13: 9789992188903

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd)

Synopsis

For one young boy, a box full of nothing is a ticket to adventure While skipping school, James sees his mother on the street. He ducks inside an abandoned store, where an aged shopkeeper asks what he wants to buy. When James says "nothing," the old man sells it to him: a heavy cardboard box stuffed full of top-quality nothing. James tries to explain this to his mother, but she doesn't believe him and throws the box over the fence and into the dump. He sneaks in to retrieve his new possession-and finds himself trapped in another world. The dump is an eerie place populated by hyperintelligent rats, monstrous seagulls, and a very clever pile of garbage called the Burra. Once it was a thriving community, but something strange has happened, and the dump has become stuck in time. To get back home, James must help the Burra save the dump-using all the nothing he can find. This ebook features an illustrated personal history of Peter Dickinson including rare images from the author's collection.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.
 
The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: The Glass-Sided Ants Nest (1968) and The Old English Peepshow (1969). Dickinson was shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice.
 
Dickinson served as chairman of the Society of Authors and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature. Peter Dickinson died on December 16, 2015, at the age of eighty-eight.
 
 

From School Library Journal:

Grade 5-8 Young James is trapped in a weirdly changed garbage dump inhabited by patrols of armed giant rats, huge seagulls, and a sentient pile of rubbish named Burra. He has brought into this strange place a box of very high quality Nothing that turns out to be the key to his escape , but first he has to get out of a rat prison camp; duel a proud gull chieftain; and make his way with Burra, in the form of an airship made of plastic bags, bits of rope, and less identifiable things, to the site of the singularity, or cosmic implosion, that caused the dump to change. Lively characters inhabit a vividly described landscape: dangerous but comically excitable rats; eerie, lordly gulls; the polymorphic Burra, slow and dignified``We don't like being garbage. We are trying not to be''and James, himself, spirited and curious. At the end (or rather, Beginning), James' box of Nothing sparks off a universe-engendering Big Bang, and he finds himself back in his old neighborhood with a parallel set of memories, watching the dump being levelled for a park. A stimulating, multi-layered story, fast moving and pleasantly free of long explanations. John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd)
• ISBN 10: 9992188901
• ISBN 13: 9789992188903
• Binding: Unknown Binding