Timeless, beautiful, and haunting, spirals connect the four episodes of The Ghosts of Heaven, the mesmerizing new novel from Printz Award winner Marcus Sedgwick. They are there in prehistory, when a girl picks up a charred stick and makes the first written signs; there tens of centuries later, hiding in the treacherous waters of Golden Beck that take Anna, who people call a witch; there in the halls of a Long Island hospital at the beginning of the 20th century, where a mad poet watches the oceans and knows the horrors it hides; and there in the far future, as an astronaut faces his destiny on the first spaceship sent from earth to colonize another world. Each of the characters in these mysterious linked stories embarks on a journey of discovery and survival; carried forward through the spiral of time, none will return to the same place. This title has Common Core connections.

Author Biography

Marcus Sedgwick has always been fascinated with spirals, which occur throughout nature from the microscopic to the interstellar. Fundamentally elegant and mesmerizing, many cultures and individuals have ascribed a special meaning to the form. He is the author of more than a dozen books for young adults, including She Is Not Invisible, Midwinterblood, which won the 2014 Michael L. Printz Award, White Crow, and Revolver, a Printz Award Honor Book. He lives near Cambridge, England.