Book description
In 1896, in a pilgrim church in the Alps, an abandoned baby girl is
found by a cook and a housemaid. They take her home, and Annika grows up
in the servants' quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric
Viennese professors. She is happy there but dreams of the day when her
real mother will come to find her. And sure enough, one day a glamorous
stranger arrives at the door. After years of guilt and searching,
Annika's mother has come to claim her daughter, who is in fact a
Prussian aristocrat and whose true home is a great castle. But at
crumbling, spooky Spittal Annika discovers that all is not as it seems
in the lives of her new-found family . . . Eva Ibbotson's hugely
entertaining story is a timeless classic for readers young and old.
Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but spent her early childhood
travelling backwards and forwards across Europe between the homes of
her father, a scientist, and her mother, a novelist, who separated
when she was three. When the Nazis came to power, her family fled to
England. She lives in Newcastle, where she brought up her four
children and has written the best-selling novels for both adults and
children that have been published all around the world.
