Showing results by author "Marcus Sedgwick" in All Categories

In an isolated cabin in an Arctic wilderness, 14-year-old Sig is alone with a corpse: his father, who has fallen through the ice on the lake outside and frozen to death only hours earlier. Then, out of the Arctic darkness, comes a stranger: a terrifying giant of a man claiming that Sig’s father owes him a share of a horde of stolen gold - and threatening awful violence if Sig doesn’t reveal the gold’s whereabouts.

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.

Boy has survived the terrors of life with the magician Valerian, dark magic, and deadly chases, but he is still on the run. Now, as the City lies frozen, he is captured and incarcerated in the Emperor Frederick's palace. Boy is transported to a world of splendor, and wealth beyond his wildest imagining. But beneath its golden veneer, this world is full of madness and cruelty, closely guarded secrets, and terrifying revelations.

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.

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.

The days between Christmas and New Year's Eve are dead days, when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our lives. A magician called Valerian must save his own life within those few days or pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago. But alchemy and sorcery are no match against the demonic power pursuing him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.