Boy By Roald Dahl

Long before he invented the BFG, Willy Wonka or Matilda, Roald Dahl was a real boy having genuinely wild childhood experiences - and Boy collects the best (and worst) of them into one funny, occasionally grotesque memoir. There's the elaborate revenge he and his school friends took on a beastly sweetshop owner, brutal school beatings, summer holidays in Norway, a car accident that nearly sliced off his nose, and the surreal detail of being paid to taste-test chocolate for Cadbury's as a schoolboy - which, as Dahl himself notes, planted the seed for a certain chocolate factory story decades later. Illustrated throughout by Quentin Blake, Dahl's longtime collaborator, Boy captures childhood exactly the way Dahl's fiction always did: funny and painful and a little bit macabre, often in the same sentence, and never condescending to young readers. It's an excellent pick for Dahl's existing young fans curious about the real man behind the stories, for readers of children's autobiography and memoir, and for anyone building out a complete Roald Dahl collection.