Showing results by author "Marcus Sedgwick" in All Categories

The days between 27 December and New Year's Eve are dead days - days when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our everyday lives. There is a man, Valerian, whose time is running out, who must pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago.

Join the wonderfully weird Other hand family and their faithful guardian, Edgar the raven, and discover the dark secrets of Castle Other hand. Solstice and Cudweed are appalled to find their father has appointed a new school master. But things get even worse when the grumpy, viciously mean teacher actually arrives. The Other hand children are sure there's something more to him than meets the eye - the trouble is, who will believe them? No one it seems. Except, perhaps, Edgar.

Nobody likes a sticky monkey... As self-appointed Guardian of Otherhand Castle, Edgar's alarmed when a nasty looking black tail slinks off under the rhubarb plants, kitchen maids go missing and the castle begins to flood. There's never a dull moment for the strange Otherhand family; Lord Valevine, Minty his wife, 10 year old Cudweed, his pet, Fellah (the sticky monkey), and his big sister, black-haired, gothic-ly gorgeous Solstice, as they come face to face with the owner of the black tail.

Imagine that a few years from now England is covered by water, and Norwich is an island. Zoe, left behind in the confusion when her parents escaped, survives there as best she can. Alone and desperate among marauding gangs, she manages to dig a derelict boat out of the mud and gets away to Eels Island. But Eels Island, whose raggle-taggle inhabitants are dominated by the strange boy Dooby, is full of danger, too. The belief that she will one day find her parents spurs Zoe on to a dramatic escape in a story of courage and determination that is handled with warmth and humanity.

Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar even when you've never been there before, or felt that you've known someone even though you are meeting them for the first time? In a novel comprising seven parts, each of them influenced by a moon, and travelling from 2073 back in time to the dark of the moon and the days of Viking saga, this is the story of Eric and Merle who have loved and lost one another and who have been searching for each other ever since.

It is 1915. 17-year-old Sasha Fox is the privileged only daughter of a respected doctor living in Brighton. But her brothers, Edgar and Tom, have gone to war and Sasha has a terrible gift. She can see the future.

Cassie Cotton has always been unusual, a bit different – but this only makes her more intriguing to her classmate Fitz. Cassie can hear a noise that most people don’t notice or recognise, and she believes it’s a sound that shows the Earth is in distress, damaged by human activity that is causing climate change. When this belief leads to her being ridiculed and bullied at school, Cassie disappears. Fitz is determined to find her, but he has no idea where to start looking, or if he’ll be in time to help her…

Join the wonderfully weird Otherhand family and their faithful guardian, Edgar the raven, and discover the dark secrets of Castle Otherhand.The rumblings and wailings from the Lost South Wing can no longer be ignored, as one by one, members of the castle are being found frozen, 'scared to death'. With mother, Minty, obsessing over her latest fad - sewing - and father, Valevine, busy experimenting with a machine to discover the Lost Otherhand treasure, it's up to aspiring ghost-hunters Solstice and Cudweed to solve the mystery.

Prize-winning author Marcus Sedgwick explores obsession, trust and coincidence in this gripping thriller. Sixteen-year-old Laureth Peak's mission is to find her missing father. A mission made all the more difficult by one fact: Laureth Peak is blind. Laureth's father is a writer. For years he's been trying, and failing, to write a novel about coincidence. His wife thinks he's obsessed. Laureth thinks he's on the verge of a breakdown.

It's summer. Rebecca is an unwilling visitor to Winterfold - taken from the buzz of London and her friends and what she thinks is the start of a promising romance. Ferelith already lives in Winterfold - it's a place that doesn't like to let you go, and she knows it inside out - the beach, the crumbling cliff paths, the village streets, the woods, the deserted churches and ruined graveyards, year by year being swallowed by the sea.

We need to speak of the dead. We need to speak for the dead, for they cannot speak for themselves. There are things they would want to say to us if only they could talk. But surely they cannot. No longer can we walk into the next room and find them standing there as they did in life, and hear what they have to say. They are gone. Yet.... Yet they linger. So it is with this girl who’s gone now. Her name, when they still said it aloud, was Isobel.

Ash has lived in eight states in as many years. Mom has gone walkabout, but stepdad Jack is like a father and stepbrother Bly the best anyone could wish for. When Bly goes missing too, Ash sets off to search for him and finds something much bigger: the sickness of the world. Arriving in Snowflake, Arizona, Ash discovers Bly living with a community 6,000 feet high in the wide red desert. They call themselves the Canaries, and all suffer from some kind of environmental illness.

"Do monsters always stay in the book where they were born? Are they content to live out their lives on paper, and never step foot into the real world?" The Villa Diodati, on the shore of Lake Geneva, 1816: the Year without Summer. As Byron, Polidori, and Mr and Mrs Shelley shelter from the unexpected weather, old ghost stories are read and new ghost stories imagined. Born by the twin brains of the Shelleys is Frankenstein, one of the most influential tales of horror of all time. In a remote mountain house, high in the French Alps, an author broods on Shelley's creation.

Ash boards a Greyhound bus heading to the place where Bly was last seen: Snowflake, Arizona. Six thousand feet up in the wide red desert, Ash meets Mona, her dog, her goat, and her neighbors, and finds stepbrother Bly, too. In their ramshackle homes, the walls lined with tinfoil, almost all the residents of Snowflake are sick. But this isn’t any ordinary sickness: the chemicals and technologies of modern life are poisoning them.