A tense, fast-paced detective story set in the 1950s in the haunting north Norfolk salt marshes where a dark secret has lain hidden, but suddenly there’s more than just Annie and Sandy trying to solve the case of the missing angels and they’ll stop at nothing to get there first. Carnegie Medal winning Kevin Crossley-Holland is brilliant at bringing historical episodes to life and together with a quality of writing almost unsurpassed in historical fiction he is sure to grab the reader’s attention on every page.
In the village of Waterslain in Norfolk, in the 1950s, a fragment from a carved angel's wing is discovered. Maybe the wooden angels that once supported the church roof were not, after all, destroyed centuries ago, but spirited away to safety. Two children decide to find them.
There are few clues, but a strange inscription on the church wall leads them into terrifying places - up to the top of the church tower, down a tunnel where they are nearly drowned. Annie dreams of the man who was sent in by Cromwell to smash up the church, and of angels flying and falling. For Sandy, whose father, an American airman, was recently killed, the angels bring comfort.
The whereabouts of the angels becomes clear to them - but then they discover that other people are hunting for them, and are determined to stop the children at all costs. The friendship between the boy adjusting to a new life in his mother's village, and the girl whose family have always lived on their remote farm, the haunting atmosphere of the Norfolk saltmarshes, and the strong sense of the past still present, give richness to a tense and fast-paced story of detection for younger readers.
Kevin Crossley-Holland was born in 1941 in Mursley, North Buckinghamshire, and grew up in Whiteleaf, a village in the Chiltern hills of western England. He attended Oxford University, where after failing his first exams, he developed his passion for Anglo-Saxon literature. After graduating, he was the Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, and from 1972–1977, he lectured in Anglo-Saxon for the Tufts University of London program. He worked as a children's book editor while beginning to write his own poems and reinterpretations of medieval legends. He has also taught for extended periods in America. He now lives in Norfolk, England.
Kevin Crossley-Holland has published six volumes of adult poetry and several libretti for opera. In the world of children's books, he is best known for his numerous retellings and anthologies, and in particular his version of Beowulf. "Storm," his novella, won the Carnegie Medal in 1985.
