Prospero's Children - Softcover

Siegel, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006512801 ISBN 13: 9780006512806

Publisher: HarperVoyager, 2011

Synopsis

English fantasy at its finest, this exciting new trilogy steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Clive Barker's Weaveworld. A Key - lost since the dawn of civilization - is about to be found...A mysterious house in the remote Yorkshire moors awaits sixteen-year-old Fern and her brother Will, when they are taken there for the summer holidays. Their hearts sink at the coming weeks of boredom, but as the old house gradually gives up its secrets, their familiar world starts to fracture, giving access to a magical and corrupt land destroyed thousands of years ago. Outside on the moors stands a stone, watching the house, but not always from the same place; inside, a sinister statue glows malevolently. At night, strange creatures seek to enter the house; and gradually their father's exotic new partner takes over part of the house, keeping her secrets behind magically locked doors. And as their lives are invaded by the fantastical, Fern finds herself being courted by the enigmatic wanderer, Ragginbone, and the sinister art-dealer, Javier Holt, for they know that she has the Gift: a unique and powerful talent for magic not seen for ten thousand years. Hidden somewhere within the house is a talisman which has been sought by the forces of good and evil for millennia. A talisman so powerful that it can be used to shape time, to destroy civilizations, perhaps even conquer death. With events moving to a desperate and fatal climax, Fern and Will must decide who, and what, to believe...but what kind of door will it open?

About this title

Review:

Fern and Will, the children of a feckless art dealer, find themselves sharing the remote farmhouse he has inherited with his current, and sinister, mistress. Something snuffles outside; a stone in the garden, which bears an odd resemblance to a passing tramp, moves in the night; a wolfish dog befriends them. Dreams and sleepwalking and the most remarkable videotape ever watched provide 16-year-old Fern with evidence that the world is not the controllable, rational place she thought it was--and that her own future is to be altogether more remarkable, and full of pain and wisdom, than she has expected.

Jan Siegel has taken the material of a hundred good children's fantasies and woven a story which hovers, like her heroine, on the brink of being fully adult, with the visionary power that often comes from inhabiting the threshold between states. Her handling of shopworn questions--the paradoxes of time, the price of souls and the sinking of Atlantis--is as fresh and remarkable as fantasy gets; this impressive first novel is a classic in the making, and, it is to be hoped, the debut of a brilliant career. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

From the Inside Flap:

It began ages past in fabled Atlantis, when a mad, power-hungry queen forged a key to a door never meant to be opened by mortal man--its inception would hasten her own death and the extinction of her vainglorious race. For millennia the key lay forgotten beneath the waves, lost amid the ruins of what had been the most beautiful city on Earth. But however jealously the sea hoards its secrets, sooner or later it yields them up. Now, in present-day Yorkshire, that time has come. And for young Fernanda Capel, life will never be the same again . . .

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperVoyager
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0006512801
• ISBN 13: 9780006512806
• Binding: Paperback