Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Fiction. Audiobook from Harper Children's Audio. Published 2002. Purchased from audible.com. (Although they don't seem to have it anymore. It is available from amazon.co.uk though.)

This audiobook was purchased for Cara's listening pleasure. (I like to try and read some of the same things the kids read, in part to have a topic for conversation and in part to have an idea what is going into their heads.) At just over three hours it's not a very long book at all. But, it was an enjoyable story. It is intended to be scary and was just about as much scary as I am willing to subject myself to! Might be more so for a younger child though. Cara says it scared her a little the first time she listened to it.

Publisher's summary:
The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring....

In Coraline’s family’s new flat there are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked and on the other side is a brick wall, until one day when Coraline unlocks the door and finds a passage to another flat in another house exactly like her own.

Only it’s different.

At first, things seem fantastic in the new flat. The food is better. The toy box is full of exciting toys, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer and little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there’s another mother and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their daughter. They want to change her and never let her go.

Coraline discovers there are other children trapped there already and she is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits if she is to save the lost children, her real parents and herself.

In this alternately whimsical, creepy, charming and dreamlike story, written in simple but elegant prose, Neil Gaiman has created a modern fairytale that is at times funny, at times frightening and at times beautifully surreal.

To buy on amazon, click here: Coraline