Shortlisted for the Independent Booksellers Book Award 2011
A headlong new title in this best-selling series, Joshua narrates a new adventure with his trademark sharpness and familiar cool. Joshua is in danger as soon as he begins the quest to find out why his father has gone missing after a plane crash in Mexico. Soon Joshua finds himself caught up in a terrifying world of the Mayan past where nothing is quite what it seems to be. How will Joshua get back to the present day and will everything seem the same afterwards? A page turning adventure with a great character at its heart.
Lovereading4kids comment:
Explosive and compelling - the fourth part of the best-selling JOSHUA FILES series. Gripping, fast-paced and exciting, this is sure to get the adrenalin pumping round the readers' body. One boy, one deadly prophecy and one heart-stopping adventure and unless Josh can handle it an electromagnetic pulse witll blast through the atmosphere on 22nd December and the world will end. This series just gets better and better and as with the previous three titles in the series, the first edition of each comes in a brilliant PVC cover - this one is blue and it's impossible to miss if you buy it in your local bookshop. Alternatively just get it here!
Josh and Ixchel have travelled back in time, but it might not be so easy to get home again. They've landed in the Mayan era, when the prophecy about the world ending in 2012 was first foretold. And they cannot believe who they have found there. Clearly Josh isn't the only person to have cracked the secret of time travel.
But a bigger surprise awaits the pair when they return to the 21st century. Nothing is quite as they remember it - and it's up to them to work out why.
M.G. Harris (M.G. stands for Maria Guadalupe) was born in Mexico City. When her parents split up, five year-old M.G. moved to Frankfurt, Germany, with her air stewardess mother and younger sister, and later to Manchester, England. Growing up as a Mancunian, M.G. based her formative years around the television series Doctor Who and Blake's 7 and the fortunes of Manchester United. As a teenager, during regular visits to her father in Mexico, M.G. became fascinated by Mayan archaeology. She made several trips to Mayan ruins in Yucatan and Chiapas and one such trip gave her the seed of the idea of what would later become The Joshua Files: Invisible City.
As a student, M.G. was interested in molecular biology and studied biochemistry at St Cross College, Oxford. M.G. spent several years working in research laboratories before setting up her own internet company. Whilst visiting family in Switzerland in 2004, a skiing accident left M.G. with a shattered tibia plateau. Forced to spend many weeks recuperating from surgery, she decided to keep a promise she'd made to herself to one day pursue a career as a novelist. Writing on a laptop next to her bed, M.G. began work on a techno thriller which combined her two intellectual loves - archaeology and biology. From this initial manuscript came the idea for a story featuring a young boy searching for a lost Mayan codex... and The Joshua Files were born.
In an attempt to cover up the fact that she's a bit of a geek, M.G. spends as much time as possible going out to salsa clubs to dance. She adores anything written by her quartet of literary gurus: Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. M.G. lives in Oxford with her husband and their two daughters. She was the fastest-selling UK debut children's author of 2008.
She introduces The Joshua Files in this video (and in case you missed the first one, Invisible City, there are also some intriguing details about the plot):
