Beck

Beck
ISBN: 9781406361421
Publication Date: 1 August 2017

The final novel from Carnegie Medal-winning author Mal Peet is a sweeping coming-of-age adventure, with all the characteristic beauty and strenth of his prose.

Both harrowing and life-affirming, the final novel from Carnegie Medal-winning author Mal Peet is the sweeping coming-of-age adventure of a mixed race boy transported to North America. Born from a street liaison between a poor young woman and an African sailor in the 1900s, Beck is soon orphaned and sent to the Catholic Brothers in Canada. Shipped to work on a farm, his escape takes him across the continent in a search for belonging. Enduring abuse and many hardships, Beck has times of comfort and encouragement, eventually finding Grace, the woman with whom he can finally forge his life and shape his destiny as a young man. A picaresque novel set during the Depression as experienced by a young black man, it depicts great pain but has an uplifting and inspiring conclusion.

• Beck is Mal Peet's truly astonishing final novel, moving across a continent during the Great Depression.
• Mal Peet won the Carnegie Medal for Tamar. He is also the winner of the Branford Boase Award for Keeper and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for Exposure.
• Meg Rosoff completed Mal's nearly finished novel, a promise she had made to him before he died.

About the Author

Mal Peet's first novel, Keeper, won the Branford Boase Award and the Bronze Nestle Children's Book Prize; Tamar won the Carnegie Medal; and Exposure was the winnerof the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. A writer and illustrator, Mal produced many books for children throughout his lifetime, most of them in collaboration with his wife, Elspeth Graham. He also wrote a criti...