The Graveyard Book

A man named Jack murders three members of a family but misses the youngest, a toddler who has crawled out of the house and up the hill to a graveyard. The ghosts who find him agree to raise him. Mr and Mrs Owens become his adoptive parents, he is named Nobody Owens, ’Bod’ for short, and he is given the Freedom of the Graveyard, which lets him pass through solid objects within its walls.

Silas, a caretaker who exists on the border between life and death, becomes his guardian. The novel follows Bod as he grows up among the dead.