ection id="u2470f59d-d428-51ac-af56-45c607eaf4f7">
HarperCollins Children’s Books
An imprint of of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in the USA by ‘Houghton Mifflin Books for Children’ an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2004
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014
Copyright © Lois Lowry 2004
Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout Studio
Lois Lowry asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007597284
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780007597291
Version: 2016-12-07
Table of Contents
Read all of the incredible books in The Giver Quartet:
Other Novels in The Giver Quartet
MATTY WAS IMPATIENT to have the supper preparations over and done with. He wanted to cook, eat, and be gone. He wished he were grown so that he could decide when to eat, or whether to bother eating at all. There was something he needed to do, a thing that scared him. Waiting just made it worse.
Matty was no longer a boy, but not yet a man. Sometimes, standing outside the homeplace, he measured himself against the window. Once he had stood only to its sill, his forehead there, pressing into the wood, but now he was so tall he could see inside without effort. Or, moving back in the high grass, he could see himself reflected in the glass pane. His face was becoming manly, he thought, though childishly he still enjoyed making scowls and frowns at his own reflection. His voice was deepening.
He lived with the blind man, the one they called Seer, and helped him. He cleaned the homeplace, though cleaning bored him. The man said it was necessary. So Matty swept the wooden floor each day and straightened the bedcovers: neatly on the man’s bed, with haphazard indifference on his own, in the room next to the kitchen. They shared the cooking. The man laughed at Matty’s concoctions and tried to teach him, but Matty was impatient and didn’t care
