About this item
A small bat blown off course makes the perilous journey home with new friends in the adventurous middle grade odyssey from award-winning author Kenneth Oppel - this bestselling story is now available in graphic novel format!. Shade the young silverwing bat may be the runt of his colony, but he's determined to prove himself on the long, dangerous winter migration to Hibernaculum - millions of wingbeats to the south. Too soon, his hopes are dashed when a fierce storm catches Shade in its grasp. Driven far from the others by the unforgiving winds, Shade is left alone. On his journey back to his family, Shade meets other winged loners. Marina is a Brightwing bat with a strange metal band on her leg, Zephyr the mystical albino bat has an unusual gift, and Goth the carnivorous vampire bat is the largest bat Shade has ever seen.
About the Author
I was born in 1967 in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C. and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. ..At around twelve I decided I wanted to be a writer (this came after deciding I wanted to be a scientist, and then an architect) . I started out writing sci-fi epics (my Star Wars phase) then went on to swords and sorcery tales (my Dungeons and Dragons phase) and then, during the summer holiday when I was fourteen, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games (written, of course, during my video game phase) . It turned out to be quite a long story, really a short novel, and I rewrote it the next summer. We had a family friend who knew Roald Dahl - one of my favourite authors - and this friend offered to show Dahl my story. I was paralysed with excitement. I never heard back from Roald Dahl directly, but he read my story, and liked it enough to pass on to his own literary agent. I got a letter from them, saying they wanted to take me on, and try to sell my story. And they did.
