When Tom follows a strange lantern down an impossible alleyway, he finds himself lost in the Labyrinth – a bewildering maze that protects our everyday world from the sinister dreamlands of ‘Faerie’, where imaginary creatures become real.
Through an enchanted mirror Tom meets Persistence, an apprentice ‘hobwitch’, who reveals the secret of a sparkling energy called ‘figment’: raw imagination that emanates from all humans, and which imaginary creatures need to exist. In exchange for figment, a fairy ‘familiar’ can not only become your guide in the perilous Labyrinth, they can even do something that is otherwise impossible in the Everyday.
Magic!
Soon Tom and Persie, with their familiars Fleaswax and Mortimer, are braving harpies and trolls, ghosts and wyverns – and even the mysterious ‘Wodewose’ – as they race to unravel a family mystery only Tom’s Great Grandfather, leader of the shadowy Esoterical Society, seems to understand. But can Tom really trust a hobwitch? Surely it’s the ‘Esotericals’, with their secret knowledge and ‘smitesilver’ rings, who are the last line of defence against the horrors of Faerie. Especially when an elemental monster of unfathomable power – the Smothering Dark – is fighting to break into the Everyday in pursuit of her prey: Tom himself.
A dark urban fantasy about the power of the imagination, the difference between a maze and a labyrinth, and what happens when our nightmares come true, The LANTERN & the LABYRINTH will be published by Puffin Press in April, 2027.
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