Ten years on, Kate, Michael and Emma have grown up in a string of miserable orphanages, and all memories of their parents have faded to a blur. Arriving at Cambridge Falls, the children quickly realise there is something different about this place - and Kate feels sure she has seen the dark, crooked house before.

It's been six months since Kate, Michael and Emma confronted the Dire Magnus, but the trail to their long-lost family remains cold. Then Michael and Emma find the man who was the last person to see them. He knows about a secret map of a distant, mysterious land - maybe this is the clue that will lead them to their parents...

This is the final instalment in the Books of Beginning series. Emma, Michael and Kate are locked in a race against time: to find their parents; to defeat the evil Dire Magnus; and to locate the final Book of Beginning. When all three books are united, their power will be unstoppable. Embarking on a perilous journey to the land of the dead, Emma is forced to confront terrifying monsters and ghosts. As the fabric of time begins to fray, she becomes the final piece of an extraordinary puzzle. Only she can master the Book of Death.

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award This volume establishes a dialogue between East and West in children’s literature scholarship. In all cultures, children’s literature shows a concern to depict identity and individual development, so that character and theme pivot on questions of agency and the circumstances that frame an individual’s decisions and capacities to make choices and act upon them. Such issues of selfhood fall under the heading subjectivity. Attention to the representation of subjectivity in literature enables us to consider how values are...

In this fascinating study, John Stephens inteprets the significance of the immense cultural change which took place in Italy from the time of Petrarch to the Reformation, and considers its wider contribution to Europe beyond the Alps. His important analysis (which is designed for students and serious general readers of history as well as the specialist) is not a straight narrative history; rather, it is an examination of the humanists, artists and patrons who were the instruments of this change; the contemporary factors that favoured it; and the elements of ancient thought they revived.