A stunning story set in seventeenth-century London and the fairy world, from a CARNEGIE MEDAL and COSTA-prizewinning author.

I am Coriander Hobie.

I was born in the year of Our Lord 1643, the only child of Thomas and Eleanor Hobie, in our great house on the River Thames in London. Of my early years I remember only happiness. That was before I knew this world had such evil in it, and that my fate was to be locked up in a chest and left to die.

This is my story. This is my life.

'an extraordinarily beautiful and gripping tale, but what astonishes is Gardner's prose ... This is a classic new novel by an author who has written a rich fairytale for our times.'
Amanda Craig, The Times


'a suspenseful masterpiece'
Publisher's Weekly
'A glorious, beautifully written novel ... This story entranced me from page one and didn't let me go until the last sentence.'
The Bookseller

Available on Audio.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

UK £6.99

9781444015676

A stunning story set in seventeenth-century London and the fairy world, from a CARNEGIE MEDAL and COSTA-prizewinning author.

The story is told by Coriander, daughter of a silk merchant in 1650s London. Her idyllic childhood ends when her mother dies and her father goes away, leaving Coriander with her stepmother, a widow who is in cahoots with a fundamentalist Puritan preacher. She is shut away in a chest and left to die, but emerges into the fairy world from which her mother came, and where time has no meaning. When she returns, charged with a task that will transform her life, she is seventeen.

This is a book filled with enchantments -- a pair of silver shoes, a fairy shadow, a prince transformed into a fox - that contrast with the heartbreaking loss and cruelty of Coriander's life in the real world. With its brilliantly realised setting of old London Bridge, and underpinned by the conflict between Royalists and Puritans, it is a terrific page-turner, involving kidnapping, murder and romance, and an abundance of vivid characters.