Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children: The First Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children - Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children 1 (Paperback)

…when I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.

Jacob Portman thinks nothing extraordinary will ever happen to him, growing up in a sleepy, backwater, Florida town. The most interesting things in his life surround his beloved grandfather Abraham, an inveterate storyteller with all manner of unbelievable tales from his childhood.

Then Abraham is violently killed and Jacob’s life is plunged into grief and doubt. He is left with his grandfather’s unique collection of black-and-white photographs and the stories Abraham bequeathed to Jacob, stories that he can’t seem to put out of his mind.

As Jacob’s grief compels him towards an isolated Welsh island, he finds himself confronted with an ever-deepening mystery around the ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the place Abraham grew up. As Jacob wanders the crumbling corridors and dust-soaked rooms, he realises that everything, including time itself, may be slipping out of place.

As he encounters the strange and wonderful children his grandfather was raised with, Jacob realises they all have extraordinary abilities (and spectacularly evocative names) and exist in a series of time loops, meaning that none of them is the age they seem. There are the immensely strong siblings Bronwyn and Victor Bruntley, the wholly invisible Millard Nullings, and the lighter-than-air Olive Abroholos Elephanta, who must be always attached to the earth to avoid floating away. Then there is the captivating, haunting Miss Peregrine herself.

It is the ghostlike hollowgasts, though, that will define Jacob’s fate, making him realise that he too has his own special power, that he is in mortal danger and that eventually he must choose, between the ordinary life he knows and what comes after.