And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

com Haddon claimed that this was the first book that he wrote intentionally for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publiMark Haddonr suggested marketing it to both adult and child audiences (it has been a great hit with adults and children alike). In 2003 Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and in 2004 the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a book which is written from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome. In 2009 he donated the short story "The Island" to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors.