The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book is a young adult fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman. The story is about a boy named Nobody Owens, whose family is killed by a mysterious man named Jack, and who is subsequently adopted and raised by the occupants of an old graveyard. Gaiman's first full-length children's novel since the bestselling and widely acclaimed Coraline, The Graveyard Book won the 2009 Newbery Award.

Gaiman first had the idea for the story in 1985 after seeing his then two year-old son Mike "pedaling his tricycle around a graveyard". Recalling how at home his son looked there, Gaiman thought he "could write something a lot like The Jungle Book and set it in a graveyard".
Each chapter takes the form of a short story, and each is set a year or two apart as the protagonist grows up. Some of the chapters have direct analogs to Rudyard Kipling's 1894 work (from which The Graveyard Book also takes its title), for example, the chapter "The Hounds of God" parallels the story "Kaa's Hunting".