IT IS 1660, THE YEAR OF the return of the King, and young Coriander Hobie has lit seven candles to write her story by. The daughter of a merchant living a stone’s throw from the old London Bridge, she was born after her father met her mother on midsummer’s day and subsequently enjoyed a life “charmed with love and good fortune”. Two mysterious miniatures survive of Coriander’s parents. One shows her mother against a forest of oak trees, with a distant tower and a hunting party; the other has her father against a city very like London, except that its opal green river has mermaids, sea monsters and ships with golden sails. This world looks as though it exists — and it does.

Sally Gardner, author of I, Coriander, is one of our most successful authors of picture books such as Fairy Shopping and The Glass Heart, whose intricate illustrations seemed to be a response to her dyslexia.

Coriander’s portraits are the clue to an extraordinarily beautiful and gripping tale, but what astonishes is Gardner’s prose. I had assumed that the inability to see words and spell them would also mean a dyslexic is unable to “hear” how words create their own music. How wrong this was: “My mother was still standing by the mirror. Suddenly she made a gasping sound . . . The pearls round her neck broke free and poured down with a hard tip-tap like raindrops, bouncing up only to hit the wooden floorboards again. Then my mother’s eyelids fluttered and closed as she began to sink, her skirts billowing beneath her like the sails of a ship. The pins that held her hair in place came loose as she went down. She landed with a deadening thud as her head hit the unforgiving floor, her arms stretched out, her hair a golden sea of waves.”

Coriander, like any child, is only dimly aware of the execution of Charles I, nestling in her parents’ love and the protection of Danes, the mysterious housekeeper who helps to maintain her mother’s medicinal herb garden; but the evil and hypocrisy of Puritanism is about to invade her life with a vengeance. When she meets an odd man who gives her an alluring pair of silver shoes, which dissolve into dreams of a sinister old woman and a raven, it is only the start of a journey that begins with her mother’s death, her father’s remarriage to a cruel stepmother, and a trance-like journey into the world of faerie. Many fairytales revolve around that half-dreamy, quasi-erotic state of adolescence but this extends and deepens it as a historical novel.

Not only must Coriander save herself, she must help Tycho, a prince in thrall to an evil Queen who, of course, wants him to marry her daughter.

Coriander and Tycho fall in love, but the Prince is turned into a fox and hunted for his defiance. With the help of the magical Medlar and her stepmother’s terrified daughter, Hester, Coriander returns to life and fights back against her stepmother. Murder and magic work up to a climax, and with the start of the Restoration Coriander must choose between two worlds, two suitors and two ways of being. Gardner’s passionate loathing of the Puritans, backed up by considerable research, is particularly resonant at a time when London is under attack from another brand of fanatics. This is a classic new novel by an author who has written a rich fairytale for our times.

I, CORIANDER (12+)
by Sally Gardner Orion
£8.99; 320pp
£8.54 (free p&p)
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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