The Ghosts of Heaven
The Spiral Edition
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2016, this mesmerising and mysterious novel by Printz Award-winning author Marcus Sedgwick is written in four cleverly interlinked parts and can be read in 24 different ways. Spanning thousands of years, The Ghosts of Heaven can tell us a secret as old as time, about survival, discovery, and the effect of the spiral - a symbol that has no end - on all our lives.
It's there when a girl walks through the forest, the moist green air clinging to her skin. There centuries later in a pleasant green dale, hiding the treacherous waters of Golden Beck that take Anna, who they call a witch. There on the other side of the world, where a mad poet watches the waves and knows the horrors they hide, and far into the future as Keir Bowman realises his destiny. Each takes their next step in life. None will ever go back to the same place. The spiral has existed as long as time has existed. Follow the ways of infinity to discover its meaning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a prehistoric era, a girl learns the secrets of the cave paintings that give her people their sustenance and identity. In 18th-century England, a priest campaigning against witchcraft and evil targets a young woman who inherits her mother's role of a "gracewife," drawing the village into the plot against her. At the beginning of the 20th century, a Lovecraft-inspired poet goes mad in a nightmarish East Coast asylum while a well-meaning student of "modern" psychology tries to help. And in the future, the steward of a deep-space colonization mission learns that his undertaking is rooted in a lie. This quartet of stories can be read in any order, readers are told, and they obliquely reference each other; a through-line exists in the mysterious and persistent imagery of the spiral, a central focus and fascination. Printz-winner Sedgwick (Midwinterblood) doesn't shy from the tragedy inherent in human interaction; these are not cheerful stories, and their protagonists don't fare well, although their deeds resonate in small ways through history. Readers who like untangling puzzles will enjoy parsing the threads knitting together this corkscrew of tales. Ages 12 up.
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