A wonderful, magical book, full of ancient myth, set in 1930s Oxford between the wars. Anna is twelve, and she has already killed a man. Except he was not a man at the time. It is 1930 and the new decade is complicated, even in the depths of rural Oxfordshire. An orphan from a faraway country, Anna lives with an old farmer named Gabriel who may be a demon, or an angel, or both. Her best friends are a doll named Pie and a werewolf. Her long-lost mother was an Anatolian witch, and there are those who say that in Anna the witchcraft lurks too. She does not desire it. As she says to her friend C.S. Lewis, "All I want is for life to be normal, without complications. I just want to be an ordinary girl." But she no longer lives in the ordinary world. Another has opened out beyond her own, beneath 1930's England. It is the Old World of myth and story, and it is not a fairy-tale. It is a darkness filled with eyes and teeth.

Author Biography

Paul Kearney is the best-selling author of the Macht trilogy (The Ten Thousand, Kings of Morning and Corvus) as well as the Monarchies of God and the Sea Beggars series, both of which are considered modern classics of fantasy. He was born in Northern Ireland and studied Old Norse, Middle English and Anglo Saxon at Oxford University, and subsequently lived for several years in both Denmark and the United States. He lives in County Down, in a croft with a boat by the door.