I Was a Rat

When a small boy turns up on Bob and Joan’s doorstep unable to say much except ‘I was a rat’, the kindly couple adopt him. After all, Bob reads about odder things every day in the newspaper! To them, the sunny little chap is Roger, and he’s trying hard to adapt to human life. But when he gets lost and ends up on the run, the newspapers paint a different picture. To them he is ‘the Monster’, a rodent fiend who will terrorise the town. Only a friend in a very high place can save Roger from the forces which are determined to exterminate him… Cleverly weaving elements of the Cinderella story into a subtle parody of modern times, master storyteller Philip Pullman creates a dazzling gallery of virtuous and villainous characters in a book which will grip every reader.

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  • Photo of Philip Pullman

    Philip Pullman

    Philip Pullman is probably the world’s most acclaimed living children’s author, best known for the trilogy of books known as His Dark Materials.

    Awards

    Philip won the Nestle Smarties award for both Clockwork and The Firework Maker’s Daughter. Northern Lights was published in hardback in July 1995. That year, it won the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and was Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

    The Amber Spyglass won WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year 2000 at the British Book Awards, was Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal and was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2001. Philip Pullman was voted Whitaker Author of the Year by the Booksellers Association. The Amber Spyglass went on to win both Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 and in doing so became the first children’s book to win the main prize in the award’s history.

    Philip has also been recognised with two major awards for his contribution to literature: the Eleanor Farjeon award in 2002, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize in 2005.

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