Runemarks

Book excerpt: Seven oâe(tm)clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again. Maddy Smith has always been an outsider. In a world ruled by the harsh and puritanical Order, she is shunned for the strange birthmark on her left hand. For this is no ordinary birthmark âe" it is a runemark, a sign of the old gods. In fact, Maddy can do things that no-one else can, things that could be called magic. But not until she meets the old traveller One-Eye, an outsider like herself, does she learn what power she really has, and what she will be asked to do with it. In Runemarks, Joanne Harris creates a world not unlike our own - if it had been shaped by the Vikings instead of the Romans - and colours it with her familiar blend of rich imagery and gritty realism. A disenchanted world, where the gods died long ago. Can Maddy bring them back to life?