Age 10 +

Coriander lives happily in 17th-century London with her beloved parents at the start of the civil war. One day, a mysterious pair of silver shoes arrives in a parcel, and Coriander’s life changes. The shoes transport her to a fairy world that turns out to be her mother’s childhood home. Gardner evokes two mirrored worlds — one in which King Charles represents all that is good and free and life-loving, and one in which an evil queen represents the forces of darkness. While the queen reaches into the real world and takes her mother’s life, Coriander and her royalist father are threatened at home by the tyranny of the Puritan interregnum under Cromwell. Her father’s ill-advised marriage to a Puritan widow, who brings her extremist witch-finding associate into the house, leaves Coriander the victim of a cruel new regime. Thereafter, the historical and the magical interweave, each operating on a different time scheme, so Gardner’s is a tale of accelerated growing up, a drama of suffering and fear, loyalty and first love, all played out against a background of rich period detail. It is also the story of the growing pains of a nation — Britain — that went through its own fundamentalist phase.

(Orion £8.99)

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