Dimensions
130 x 200 x 23mm
I am Coriander Hobie. I was born in the year of Our Lord 1643 . . . Of my early years I remember only happiness. That was before I knew this world had such evil in it, and that my fate was to be locked up in a chest and left to die . . . This is my story. This is my life. A page-turning historical fantasy, full of kidnapping, murder and romance, and an abundance of vivid characters.
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.
The setting of old London Bridge is brilliantly realised and Coriander is a heroine to love.
