LoveReading4Kids Says
Sympathetic, touching, and surprisingly funny, Ways To Live Forever is a fantastic debut from Sally Nicholls. Sam loves facts. He wants to know about UFOs horror movies and airships and ghosts and scientists, and how it feels to kiss a girl. And because he has leukaemia he wants to know the facts about dying. Sam needs answers for the questions nobody will answer. This diary account of a young boy dying of Leukaemia will pull on heartstrings and have you in fits of laughter at the same time.
Winner of Glen Dimplex Prize for New Writers 2008
Winner of Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize 2008
Winner of Luchs Prize (Germany) for best children’s book published in Germany in the last year
Longlisted for Branford Boase Award 2009
LoveReading4Kids
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Sally Nicholls Press Reviews
"A hugely impressive achievement ... elegant, intelligent, moving." Guardian
"Wonderful. Moving and funny and, yes, sad." Eva Ibbotson
"A Jodi Picoult for teens that pulls no punches." Bookseller
"Deeply affecting and life-affirming read. Impressive." Nikki Gamble, Write Away
"Supremely confident and very moving ... a writer with a great future" John McLay
"Handled tactfully, death need not be an inappropriate theme for children. On the contrary, it can be quite uplifting." Amanda Craig, The Times
"I search for novels that send electrical tingles up my spine. Reading this was more like being plugged into a 1000-volt socket. This is a story for everyone, whatever their age." Marion Lloyd, Publisher
About Sally Nicholls
I was born in Stockton-on-Tees, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. My father died when I was two, and my brother Ian and I were brought up my mother. I always wanted to write - when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I used to say "I'm going to be a writer" - very definite.
I've always loved reading, and I spent most of my childhood trying to make real life as much like a book as possible. My friends and I had a secret club like the Secret Seven, and when I was nine I got most of my hair cut off because I wanted to look like George in the Famous Five. I was a real tomboy - I liked riding my bike, climbing trees and building dens in our garden. And I liked making up stories. I used to wander round my school playground at break, making up stories in my head.
I went to two secondary schools - a little Quaker school in North Yorkshire (where it was so cold that thick woolly jumpers were part of the school uniform) and a big comprehensive. I was very lonely at the little school, but I made friends at the comprehensive and got on all right. I didn't like being a teenager very much, though.
After school, I got to be an adult, which was fantastic. I went and worked in a Red Cross Hospital in Japan and then travelled around Australia and New Zealand. I jumped off bridges and tall buildings, climbed Mount Doom, wore a kimono and went to see a ballet in the Sydney Opera House. Then I came back and did a degree in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick. In my third year, realising with some panic that I was now supposed to earn a living, I enrolled in a masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa. It was here that I wrote Ways to Live Forever. I also won the prize for the writer with most potential, through which I got my agent. Four months later, I had a publisher.
I now live in a little house in Oxford, writing stories, and trying to believe my luck.
Photo credit Barrington Stoke website
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