Age 11+

This book has a great opening sentence: “Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, 500 years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.” Joanne Harris, best known as the author of Chocolat, is good at beginnings and pay-offs: each of the chapters in this nine-part fantasy epic has a punchy finish that makes you want to read on. This is despite the complexity of the story, which is based on Norse myth and uses elaborate geography and hierarchies. Maddy Smith, the novel’s young heroine, who was born with a rusty-coloured rune mark on her hand, has powers that make her an outsider in her village, where dream, imagination and magic are frowned upon. A nasty incident in the cellar, however, throws Maddy into the company of Norse gods, goblins and monsters, revisiting the 500-year-old conflict of Ragnarok in which the Old Order of deities was overthrown and a rigid, puritanical regime came into force. Identities and loyalties shift as the plot thickens. Especially enjoyable are Harris’s aphorisms, her satire of joyless piety, and the comically irreverent vernacular spoken by a dissolute goblin and the trickster god Loki

RUNEMARKS by Joanne Harris

(Doubleday £14.99).

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide