Marcus Sedgwick

Finland, 1910: Fifteen-year-old Sig is shocked to see a hole in the frozen lake outside his family's cabin and to find his father's corpse nearby. Why did Einar steer his dog sled across the lake instead of taking the safer land route? Sig's sister and stepmother go for help, leaving Sig alone with Einar's body in the cabin. Soon after, an armed stranger barges in, demanding a share of Einar's stolen gold from when the two men knew each other during...

Four linked stories of discovery and survival begin with a Paleolithic-era girl who makes the first written signs, continue with Anna, who people call a witch, then a mad twentieth-century poet who watches the ocean knowing the horrors it hides, and concluding with an astronaut on the first spaceship from Earth sent to colonize another world.

The year is 1944, and Harry Black, a London firefighter battling the blazes caused by constant bombing, awakes in the hospital to learn that his soldier brother, Ellis, has been killed. In the delirium of his wounded state, Harry's mind blurs the distinctions between reality of war-torn London and the myth of Orpheus. Driven by visions of Ellis and a sense of poetic inevitability, Harry sets off on a journey which will lead him deep beneath the city....

Sixteen-year-old Rebecca moves with her father from London to a small, seaside village, where she befriends another motherless girl and they spend the summer together exploring the village's sinister history.

"Seven linked vignettes unfold on a Scandinavian island inhabited--throughout various time periods--by Vikings, vampires, ghosts, and a curiously powerful plant"--Provided by publisher.

"A novel based on the life of children's book author Arthur Ransome, who left his home, his wife, and daughter and fell in love with Russia and a Russian woman and was suspected, by both sides, of being a spy"--

Having always been able to know when someone is going to die, Alexandra poses as a nurse to go to France during World War I to locate her brother and to try to save him from the fate she has foreseen for him.

On a warm Christmas Eve, a young boy wishes that it would snow overnight the way it does in his snow globe.

Humankind makes monsters; but who really creates who? This is a book about reason, the imagination, and the creative act of reading and writing. Marcus Sedgwick's ghostly, menacing novel celebrates the legacy of Mary Shelley's literary debut in its bicentenary year.