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Canongate Books - Thomas Scarlett

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167 pages

English

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Description

EVERYTHING IS MADE OF MAGIC . . . Effie Truelove and friends Lexy, Wolf, Maximilian and Raven must use their magical skills to defeat the Diberi, a corrupt organisation intent on destroying the worlds at Midwinter. But during a visit to the Otherworld, Effie is mistaken and imprisoned for being a galloglass - a dangerous, selfish islander. Can Effie and her friends reunite before total destruction is wreaked upon the universe?

Sujets

Children's

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	04 avril 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782119340
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0320€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Described by Philip Pullman as ‘ingenious and original’, Scarlett Thomas has always loved stories, magic and mysterious places. She tried (and failed) to write her first novel when she was six. Since then she has successfully written lots of novels, but this is her first series for children. She lives near the sea in an old house full of books, and is a professor in the English department of the University of Kent. Galloglass is the third volume in the Worldquake Sequence.
worldquake.co.uk
Also by Scarlett Thomas
Worldquake Sequence Dragon s Green The Chosen Ones

The paperback edition published in 2020 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright Scarlett Thomas, 2019
The right of Scarlett Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Excerpt from Joseph Campbell s The Hero with a Thousand Faces Copyright Joseph Campbell Foundation ( jcf.org ) 2008. Used with permission.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 935 7 eISBN 978 1 78211 934 0
For my family
The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world.
Joseph Campbell
No man can swim unless he enters deep water. No bird can fly unless its wings are grown, and it has space before it, and courage to trust itself to the air.
H. P. Blavatsky
And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue degenerates, and so on, will be as right and as wrong as the child who stands underneath and says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.
Leo Tolstoy
Contents
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Acknowledgements
1
T he elderly headmaster of the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange sighed and walked stiffly into the staff room. His own dark office, which he rarely left, smelled comfortingly of books, tapestries, good wine and cigars. The staff room, however, was a displeasing miasma of forgotten lunch-boxes, cheap coffee, red ink, tragic perfume and all the unique aromas of the fugitive ex-class-pets.
There was, by now quite a large selection of small mammals and birds that had momentarily forgotten themselves and bitten children (although never that badly) or eaten their own young (although rarely in public) and had, therefore, officially left the school.
Hide the guinea pigs, hissed someone. And cover Petrov.
Mrs Beathag Hide (owner of the tragic perfume) tossed a pantomime vampire s cape over the cage containing the parrot that was supposed to have been removed after swearing at the school inspector. Dr Cloudburst and Mr Peters started putting the guinea pigs cages into the Lost Property cupboard. Luckily the elderly headmaster moved slowly enough that there was plenty of time to do this.
The school cat, Neptune, uncurled from a hairy cushion and stalked off in the same direction, in the hope of finding himself shut in with the guinea pigs. He was quite deft at undoing their hutches. Mr Peters shooed him out into the main corridor. At least Neptune no longer had to be hidden. His last misdemeanour had now been forgotten, and so he had recently begun to reappear in the School Prospectus and annual newsletter. Parents liked cats.
Today, though, the headmaster was uninterested in the pets and their ignoble pasts.
It is time, he said slowly, once he eventually arrived in the centre of the room, to finalise our plan for the Winter Fair.
Everyone groaned. It wasn t that people didn t like the Old Town Winter Fair. They did. But things always went wrong during fairs, fetes and open days. It was far better, in all the teachers opinions, to keep things well-structured and predictable. Get the children in, lock the doors and try to teach them something - anything - before the end of the day. That, translated into Latin, was the school s motto, pretty much. Or it would have been if anyone had ever thought to have a motto.
We do, presumably, have a plan? said the headmaster.
We re sending five children to the university, said Mrs Beathag Hide. Some first-years expressed a desire to learn creative writing and, as you know, we have forged some links with the new Writer in Residence there. There will be workshops, I believe, for the lucky children. The way she said lucky children didn t make them sound very lucky at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The Old Town University traditionally held its Open Week during the Winter Fair. There were workshops for children, and public lectures for people who couldn t afford to go to university and wanted to learn things for free. The beautiful old butter-stone buildings were, for one week only, covered with colourful balloons.
Ah yes, said the headmaster. A Terrence Dark-Heart, I believe? He gave Mrs Beathag Hide a searching look, or as much of one as he could manage at his age.
Terrence Deer-Hart, corrected Mrs Beathag Hide. Yes. A dreadful, sentimental children s writer now apparently working on some dire epic for adults.
Remind me again why we are sending the children to him? said the headmaster, wearily.
The other lecturers in the department are rather interesting . Dora Wright is now there, of course. The new Head of Creative Writing is Professor Gotthard Forestfloor. He s the Scandinavian novelist we talked about last week, if you remember. There s also Lady Tchainsaw, the Russian avant-garde poet. The visiting professor, Jupiter Peacock, is also a rather intriguing person. You may recall that he claims to carry around with him the spirit of the ancient writer Hieronymus Moon in a small ceramic bottle stoppered with a cork. The children are bound to learn something. And we re only sending five of them. The others will be doing Winter Fair crafts with children from the Mrs Joyful School.
What about Blessed Bartolo s? asked Dr Cloudburst, peering at a test-tube which had something dry and black stuck at the bottom of it. It looked a bit like tea that has been left in the staff room over a long weekend, but was probably more dangerous than that. We won t be sending any more children there, surely?
It seemed no one could remember what the arrangement was with the Blessed Bartolo School, or what had happened to the children who d gone there last year. Had they ever come back? Perhaps not.
It ll all be fun, said Mr Peters, the Head of P.E. The children like a bit of fun.
Everyone looked at him as if he was a complete simpleton.
But he was right. Most children did like a bit of fun, and if you counted as fun seeing bad men ripped apart by demons, hearing prophecies about your best friends deaths, almost dying because you have run out of magical energy, having to confront your worst fears, being expected to fight evil, and travelling to other worlds from which you might never return, then yes, some of the children in this school knew all about fun.
Everyone loves the Winter Fair, said Dr Cloudburst.
This was true. During the Winter Fair, stalls sprung up all over the Old Town selling hot chestnuts, fermented doughnuts and marmalade made from foraged fruits. Every well-known shop had its own stall. The Esoteric Emporium brought out some of its dustiest vintage wines and oldest jars of sauerkraut to sell by the warmth of its little ovens, in which fresh sourdough bread baked gently. Madame Valentin brought her exotic snakes, all of which were planning to escape again this year. The Puppet Man displayed his very best marionettes - many of which were too frightening for children under ten to look at. Luckily there were also roasted marshmallows and lots of glittery decorations.
The main thing was that the Winter Fair made people forget the cold and the dark, as the northern hemisphere hurtled unstoppably towards the shortest day, and the various Midwinter celebrations that would keep people cheerful until the Turning of the Year, when mass depression would set in again, as it always did. It was almost as if our world - or at least, this part of it, for it was Midsummer elsewhere - became a bit more like the Otherworld, just for a time. Not that most people believed in the Otherworld, of course.

Alexa Bottle closed the door of Mrs Bottle s Bun Shop and began walking the hundred or so yards to the house where she lived with her mother and father. She was slightly late, which was unusual. Normally she was very late. It wasn t her fault - she just found her after-school job making magical remedies extremely absorbing and never quite remembered to look at the clock. At the moment she was also revising for various M-grade tests, and trying to remember the differences between all the old apothecaries systems of weights and measures. By Monday, Lexy had to know how many granums went in a scrupulum, and how many of those made a drachm. How many minims were in a fluid scruple? Twenty. At least she d remembered that. Maybe Dr Green would even be pleased with her for once.
Lexy was still in her school uniform, but in less than ten minutes she was supposed to be wearing her best dress for dinner with the Bottles important houseguest. What was his name again? Jupiter something. He was a famous writer and philosopher in town to give a public lecture at the university as part of the Winter Fair. Lexy s family had won a raffle, which meant they got to host their very own visiting personage and they had been assigned Jupiter Whatshisname.
Lexy s mother Hazel was taking her responsibilities as host very seriously. For far too long, she d said, she had simply been seen as the flower-power, hippy-dippy wife of the local