Neil Gaiman’s superb novel, The Graveyard Book, is a fantastic novel about a boy Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, and it follows him and his life, living with the dead, from the beginning when his family was murdered,

‘The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly coloured bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of.’

I love this paragraph because it is obvious that Gaiman has chosen every word as carefully as he could and he has taken great care in keeping the reader's attention.

I love the opening of this book because I think it really gets the reader's attention and keeps it throughout the book even reading the first line makes you want to read on until the end,

‘There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.’

This is a very menacing start to the novel and you want to read the whole book and not put it down. I think what makes it menacing is the words he uses. Darkness, polished, finer, sharper and sliced, these are just some words that really give you a great picture of the scene that is set and if that was not enough then Chris Riddell’s illustrations will help you even more to re-create the picture that Gaiman wants to give you.

I have not yet finished the book so I cannot give too much away about the plot but I am very much anticipating reading the rest of this brilliant, descriptive and gripping novel.