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Product Description
It began ages past in fabled Atlantis, when a mad, power-hungry queen forged a key to a door never meant to be opened by mortal man--its inception would hasten her own death and the extinction of her vainglorious race. For millennia the key lay forgotten beneath the waves, lost amid the ruins of what had been the most beautiful city on Earth. But however jealously the sea hoards its secrets, sooner or later it yields them up. Now, in present-day Yorkshire, that time has come. And for young Fernanda Capel, life will never be the same again . . .
Amazon.com Review
Fern and Will, the children of a feckless art dealer, find themselves sharing the remote farmhouse he has inherited with his current, and sinister, mistress. Something snuffles outside; a stone in the garden, which bears an odd resemblance to a passing tramp, moves in the night; a wolfish dog befriends them. Dreams and sleepwalking and the most remarkable videotape ever watched provide 16-year-old Fern with evidence that the world is not the controllable, rational place she thought it was--and that her own future is to be altogether more remarkable, and full of pain and wisdom, than she has expected.
Jan Siegel has taken the material of a hundred good children's fantasies and woven a story which hovers, like her heroine, on the brink of being fully adult, with the visionary power that often comes from inhabiting the threshold between states. Her handling of shopworn questions--the paradoxes of time, the price of souls and the sinking of Atlantis--is as fresh and remarkable as fantasy gets; this impressive first novel is a classic in the making, and, it is to be hoped, the debut of a brilliant career. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk
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