Baldur's Bones

When 14-year-old Finn, recently orphaned, goes to stay with some distant cousins in the Irish countryside, one of his first encounters is with Tara, a sparky and self-assured girl just slightly younger than himself. Her influence on him is to be profound. She introduces him to her 'secret place', a patch of wasteland on her father's farm, which turns out to have been used as a graveyard for Viking warriors who, a thousand years earlier, had come there on a raiding mission. One of these, however, is not completely at rest and it is his dramatic resurrection which serves as starting point for this skilfully structured and extremely atmospheric novel. Arrigan conveys, often with a welcome touch of humour, her understanding of how past destines and present circumstances are inextricably linked and in doing so creates a story of considerable power and interest.