It was published in the United States by Delacorte Press in 2000 and won the Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association, recognising the year's best book for young adults.

His grandfather, an ex-miner, tells him about the town's coal-mining days and the hardships and disasters that were a part of his youth.

Kit meets Allie Keenan, full of energy and life, but also shadowy John Askew and the dangerous 'game' he plays – a game called Death.

Through playing the game, Kit comes to see the lost children of the mines and begins to connect his grandfather's fading memories to his, his friends' and Stoneygate's history.

Askew is accepted back into school to take art classes, his father stops drinking, and at the end of the novel, Kit's grandfather dies.

The Horn Book Magazine noted several of these themes, including those of "light and dark, of life and death, [and] of remembering and forgetting.

Enicia Fisher noted the "rare break from story-telling tradition, [in which] David Almond gives the ending away at the beginning.

"[15] Enicia Fisher described the internal storytelling as an "imagistic tale,"[12] though it has been said that reading the book requires a "suspension of disbelief.