Books with author Meg Rosoff

In 1962, a 16-year-old boy is dropped off by his father at a boarding school on the windswept coast of East Anglia. It is a model of its kind–the rooms are freezing, the food is disgusting, the older boys are sadistic, and the masters are the ineffectual, damaged castoffs of a dying Empire. But the boy is used to the drill and well practiced at detached dreaming, imagining himself someone else, somewhere else. Until one day, falling behind one of the regular runs along the coast, he meets Finn. Finn seems like a character from a novel, or a dream. Dressed in clothes that look the way they did a century before, Finn lives alone with his cat in a tiny fisherman’s hut. The two become friends, the boy risking scandalous rumour and expulsion from school.But the idyll cannot last, disaster invades from all sides, and the boy discovers that nothing has been what he believed.What I Was will cement Meg Rosoff’s reputation as a writer of extraordinary skill and sensitivity, who recreates with uncanny exactness the passions of youth.

What I Was is a beautifully crafted and heartbreakingly poignant coming-of-age tale that is set mainly in a hut on an isolated strip of land in East Anglia. The narrator is an older man who recounts the story of his most significant friendship--that with the nearly feral and completely parentless Finn, who lives alone in a hut by the sea. He idolizes Finn and spends as much time with him at the beachside hut as possible, hoping to become self-reliant and free instead of burdened by the boarding school dress code and curfew. But the contrast between their lives becomes evermore painful, until one day the tables turn and everything our hero believes to be true explodes--with dire consequences.

Meet your unforgettable protagonist: God, who, as it turns out, is a 19-year-old boy living in the present-day and sharing an apartment with his long-suffering fifty-something personal assistant. Unfortunately for the planet, God is lazy and, frankly, hopeless. He created all of the world's species in six days because he couldn't summon the energy to work for longer. He gets Africa and America mixed up. And his beleagured assistant has his work cut out for him when God creates a near-apolcalyptic flood, having fallen asleep without turning the bath off. There is No Dog is a darkly funny novel from one of our most delightfully unpredictable writers.