Small Spaces

byKatherine Arden

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‘Don't panic. That's the first rule of survival. Never panic.’

Simple enough – until your school trip turns into a waking nightmare.

After rescuing a book from the river, eleven-year-old Ollie discovers an unsettling ghost story about the sinister Smiling Man, a fiendish trickster who’ll grant any wish – for a price. Creepy, but it’s just a story …

But when Ollie finds graves bearing the characters’ names on a school trip to a farm, that story begins to feel terrifyingly real. And then the bus breaks down on the way home. And darkness starts to fall. And the scarecrows are watching. But it’s the bus driver who sends Ollie and her friends, Coco and Brian, scrambling into the woods: ‘Best get moving,’ he said, ominously. ‘At nightfall they’ll come for the rest of you.’

As they work to unravel a hundred-year-old mystery and save their classmates from the Smiling Man, they’ll need quick thinking and even quicker feet if they’re going to survive.

Full of slow-burning tension, gorgeously atmospheric writing and fantastically realised characters, this is quality-commercial fiction at its best: brilliant storytelling that feels accessible both in execution and packaging.

About Katherine Arden

Born in Austin, Texas, Katherine Arden has always had a taste for wandering. She spent her junior year of high school in Rennes, France.

Following her acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont, she deferred enrolment for a year in order to live and study in Russia. At Middlebury, she specialized in French and Russian literature, and her studies included sojourns at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow.

After receiving her BA, she moved to Maui, Hawaii and worked every kind of odd job imaginable, from grant writing and guiding horse tours to serving as a personal tour guide. During this time she wrote what became her debut novel, The Bear and the Nightingale. After a year on the island, she moved to Briançon, France, and spent nine months teaching. She then returned to Maui, where she began writing The Girl in the Tower, the sequel to her debut, and officially launched her career as an author. Currently she lives in Vermont.

She is the author of the Winternight Trilogy for adults and the Small Spaces Quartet for children. The Warm Hands of Ghosts is her eighth novel.
Details
  • Imprint: Puffin
  • ISBN: 9780241795088
  • Length: 256 pages
  • Price: £4.99
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