The Desolations of Devil's Acre (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children) - Hardcover

Riggs, Ransom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0735231532 ISBN 13: 9780735231535

Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2021

Synopsis

Instant #1 bestseller!

The epic conclusion to the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series by Ransom Riggs.

Jacob and his friends will face deadly enemies and race through history’s most dangerous loops in this thrilling page-turner. The Desolations of Devil's Acre is the newest installment, and final adventure, in the beloved Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series.
 
The last thing Jacob Portman saw before the world went dark was a terrible, familiar face.
            Suddenly, he and Noor are back in the place where everything began—his grandfather’s house. Jacob doesn’t know how they escaped from V’s loop to find themselves in Florida. But he does know one thing for certain: Caul has returned.
            After a narrow getaway from a blood- thirsty hollow, Jacob and Noor reunite with Miss Peregrine and the peculiar children in Devil’s Acre. The Acre is being plagued by desolations—weather fronts of ash and blood and bone—a terrible portent of Caul’s amassing army.
            Risen from the Library of Souls and more powerful than ever, Caul and his apocalyptic agenda seem unstoppable. Only one hope remains—deliver Noor to the meeting place of the seven prophesied ones. If they can decipher its secret location.

About this title

About the Author

Ransom Riggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children novels. Riggs was born on a farm in Maryland and grew up in southern Florida. He studied literature at Kenyon College and film at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, bestselling author Tahereh Mafi, and their family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

For a long time there is only darkness and the sound of distant thunder and the hazy sensation of falling. Beyond that I have no self, no name. No memory. I am aware, dimly, that I used to have these things, but now they are gone and I am nearly nothing. A single photon of failing light circling a hungry void.
 
It won’t be long now.
 
I’ve lost my soul, I’m afraid, but I can’t remember how. All I can recall are slow, churning cracks of thunder, and within them the syllables of my name, whatever it used to be, drawn out until unrecognizable. That and the dark are all there is, for a long time, until another sound joins the thunder: wind. Then rain, too. There is wind, and thunder, and rain, and falling.
 
Something is coming into being, one sensation at a time. I am rising from the trench, escaping the void. My single photon becomes a flashing cluster.
 
I feel something rough against my face. I hear the creaking of ropes. The flap of something caught in the wind. Perhaps I am on a boat. Trapped in the lightless belly of some storm-tossed ship.
 
One eye blinks open. Forms thrash dimly above me. A row of swinging pendulums. Overwound clocks all out of sync, groaning, gears about to break.
 
I blink and the pendulums become bodies dropped from a gallows, kicking and twisting.
 
I find I can turn my head. Blurred shapes begin to resolve. Rough green fabric against my face. Above me, the tick-tocking bodies have become a row of storm-blown plants swinging from the rafters in creaky wicker baskets. Behind them, a wall of insect screens shudders and flaps.
 
I am lying on a porch. On the rough green floor of a porch.
 
I know this porch
I know this floor
 
Farther away, a rain-whipped lawn terminates at a dark wall of genuflecting palms.
 
I know that lawn
I know those palms
 
How long have I been here? How many years?
time is playing tricks again
 
I try to move my body, but can only rotate my head. My eyes flick to a card table and two folding chairs.
 
I’m suddenly certain that, if I could persuade my body to rise, I would find a pair of reading glasses on the table. A half-finished game of Monopoly. A mug of steaming, still-hot coffee.
 
Someone has just been here. Words have just been spoken. They hang in the air still, returning to me in echoes.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0735231532
• ISBN 13: 9780735231535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512