Book description
On the lonian island of Hyos, where James Pibble has been sent to
protect millionaire Thanassi Thanatos, it is difficult to know what is
true. Is there really a lizard that will poison you if it drowns in your
milk? Is the man from the Home Office there to kill? Or to save? Or just
to play cricket with the local boys under local rules? Why does the
grubby English girl live in a hut in a vineyard? She has a mysterious
past, true. But then so has everyone else, and most of them have
mysterious presents as well . . . Born in Zambia, Peter Dickinson
spent his childhood in Gloucestershire and was educated at Eton and
Cambridge, where he read English. Before writing full time, he worked in
various capacities on
Punch
Magazine, where he reviewed detective novels. His own first two
detective novels, Skin Deep
and A Pride of Heroes
, set a still unsurpassed record by winning the Crime Writers'
Association Gold Dagger in successive years (1968 and 1969), and his 21
crime and mystery novels have been published in several languages. Peter
Dickinson is also one of the UK's most acclaimed children's writers. He
has twice won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's
Award, as well as the Guardian
Children's Fiction Award. He has been Chairman of the Society of
Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was
awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009. He lives in
Hampshire, England.
