The Blue Hawk

In an ancient kingdom, a boy and his hawk challenge the gods

All his life, Tron has been destined to join the priests who rule his strange desert kingdom. When the old king grows sick, a ritual is called for to restore his health: the sacrifice of a blue hawk, the symbol of the god Gdu. For the first time, Tron is chosen to take part in the ritual. Just before the bird is sacrificed, the young priest notices that its eyes are cloudy. The bird is sick, and to give its soul to the king would be to kill him. And so Tron steals the bird away.

The priests are enraged at his disruption of the ritual. Some call for his head, but others see Tron’s potential. They give him three months to train the wild bird—three months to save its life and rescue the kingdom from the wrath of the gods.

Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.
 
The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: The Glass-Sided Ants Nest (1968) and The Old English Peepshow (1969). Dickinson was shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice.
 
Dickinson served as chairman of the Society of Authors and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature. Peter Dickinson died on December 16, 2015, at the age of eighty-eight.