Coram Boy
Ideal for the 2024 and 2025 exams
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £1.99
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
The modern classic and Whitbread Book of the Year 2000 is a haunting, thrilling and captivating story, for historical fiction fans and readers of Hilary McKay’s The Skylark’s War and Katherine Rundell’s The Good Thieves
The Coram man takes babies and money from desperate mothers, promising to deliver them safely to a Foundling Hospital in London. Instead, he murders them and buries them by the roadside, to the helpless horror of his son, Mish.
Mish saves one, Aaron, who grows up happily unaware of his history, proving himself a promising musician. As Aaron's new life takes him closer to his real family, the watchful Mish makes a terrible mistake, delivering Aaron and his best friend Toby back into the hands of the Coram man.
A gripping and haunting story about a dark time in British history, Coram Boy won the 2000 Whitbread Children's Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and has been adapted into a highly acclaimed stage play.
About the author
Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. With an Indian father and an English mother, she inherited two rich cultures that ran side by side throughout her life and always made her feel she belonged to both countries. Jamila’s family moved to England when she was 11. She studied music and worked for the BBC before having a family of her own and becoming a children’s writer, wanting to reflect the multicultural world in which she and her children now lived.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the great tradition of Dickens, British author Gavin mines English history, contrasting 18th-century city life with that of country estates, the wealthy classes with the poverty-stricken. Parallel plots develop as the author introduces charismatic Otis Gardiner, nicknamed the "Coram man" for his role in taking unwanted children off of the hands of rich and poor alike, and his simpleton son, 14-year-old Meshak. But Otis's nickname, taken from a nobler man than he (an actual historic figure, Captain Thomas Coram, who opened a hospital for abandoned children in 1741), is unearned; readers discover as the novel progresses just how he disposes of his charges. Meanwhile, another story emerges surrounding 13-year-old Alexander, on scholarship as a chorister at the Gloucester Cathedral, and heir to the Ashbrook estate. Making brilliant use of an omniscient narrator, the author moves easily in and out of various characters' points of view, most notably that of the emotionally unstable Meshak, whose moral compass points somewhere shy of North, but whose heart is in the right place. Alexander's and Meshak's romantic leanings toward the same young woman thicken the plot. Gavin paints low-life characters every bit as seductively as the high-society variety, and never shows her hand as the disparate threads of her narrative join together into a seamless whole. Ages 12-up.
