Into the Dark

The holiday would be an adventure, sleeping away from home for the first time in strange surroundings, a first step into the unknown.

Matthew has come with his mother to the north Norfolk coast where she has rented a cottage in the grounds of an abandoned old manor-house. A local boy, Roly, becomes his guide through a lonely and mysterious landscape of dunes and creeks and sea. These and the derelict mansion begin to haunt Matthew's imagination and he gradually senses a shadow of fear lurking beneath his deepening friendship with Roly. The truth proves to be stranger than anything he could have foreseen.

In this haunting story with a richly poetic climax, Nicholas Wilde, a master of the English ghost story, deftly combines a supernatural theme with a sensitive understanding of the emotions of a young boy as he explores the joys and the hurts of friendship, the reaching out, and the letting go.

Nicholas Wilde was born and educated in Cheltenham and went on to King's College, Cambridge. He was Head of German at The Leys School in Cambridge. As well as writing and illustrating his own books, he has spent more than fifty years collecting, researching and curating The Nicholas Wilde Collection: a fine preservation archive of Two Hundred Years of Boyhood, a field in which he has long been recognised as an authority. His collection of books and artefacts is noted as being of national importance.