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HarperCollins Children’s Books
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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
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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 about the subtlety of herbs.
“We can just put it all together in the pot,” Matty insisted. “It all goes together in our bellies anyway.”
It was a long-standing and friendly argument. Seer chuckled. “Smell this,” he said, and held out the pale green shoot that he’d been chopping.
Matty sniffed dutifully. “Onion,” he said, and shrugged. “We can just throw it in.
“Or,” he added, “we don’t even need to cook it. But then our breath stinks. There’s a girl promised she’d kiss me if I have sweet breath. But I think she’s teasing.”
The blind man smiled in the boy’s direction. “Teasing’s part of the fun that comes before kissing,” he told Matty, whose face had flushed pink with embarrassment.
“You could trade for a kiss,” the blind man suggested with