Kids into books - Kensuke’s Kingdom

This weeks title: Kensuke's Kingdom

Author: Michael Morpurgo

Illustrator: Michael Foreman

Age Group: 10-12 years


I disappeared on the night before my twelfth birthday' July 29 1988. Only now can I at last tell the whole extraordinary story, the true story. Kensuke made me promise that I would say nothing, nothing at all, until at least ten years had passed. It was almost the last thing he said to me. I promised, and because of that I have had to live out a lie. I could let sleeping lies sleep on, but more than ten years have passed now. I have done school, done college, and had time to think. I owe it to my family and to my friends, all of whom I have deceived for so long, to tell the truth about my long disappearance, about how I lived to come back from the dead.

But there is another reason for speaking now, a far, far better reason. Kensuke was a great man, a good man, and he was my friend. I want the world to know him as I knew him.


Until I was nearly eleven, until the letter came, life was just normal. There were the four of us in the house: my mother, my father, me and Stella - Stella Artois, that is, my-one-ear up and one-ear-down black and white sheepdog, who always seemed to know what was about to happen before it did.


Tomorrow: Climbing frames and playgrounds