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Sally Gardner, Author
Imprint: Orion Children's Books
Publication date: August 6, 2015
Category: Historical fiction
ISBN: 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.
Sally Gardner is an award-winning novelist from London. Her books have been translated into 22 languages and have sold more than one million copies in the UK. Her historical novel for older readers, I, Coriander, won the Smarties Children’s Book Prize in 2005. Two thrillers both set at the time of the French Revolution, The Red Necklace and The Silver Blade, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 2009, followed. Actor Dominic West (The Wire) has bought the film rights to both titles. Her YA novel, The Double Shadow, was published in 2011 to critical acclaim. Sally Gardner’s stories for middle readers include Lucy Willow and the popular Magical Children series of six titles: The Strongest Girl in the World, The Invisible Boy, The Boy with Magic Numbers, The Smallest Girl in the World, The Boy with the Lightning Feet, and The Boy who could Fly, which are also available as audio books. She has also written and illustrated picture books including The Fairy Catalogue, The Glass Heart, The Book of Princesses and Playtime Rhymes. Sally Gardner continues to be an avid spokesperson for dyslexia, working to change the way it is perceived by society. She is dyslexic and argues that it is not a disability, but a gift.
Her website is www.sallygardner.net and you can follow her on Twitter @TheSallyGardner