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A Secret of Birds and Bone

by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Interest age: 9 to 11
Reading age: 9+

Published by Chicken House, 2020

  • Historical

About this book

Sofia’s mother is an ossuarist: a bone binder, making charms and sacred boxes to house them from bone and gold. Not only the most sought-after bone crafter in Italy, Sofia thinks that her mother’s gift for binding magic to her bone creations might make her the best in the world. Yet, after a visit from a mysterious woman dressed in silver with an armoured magpie, Sofia’s mother seems tense and worried.

When their mother goes missing on Sofia’s twelfth birthday, the children are put into an orphanage owned by the duchessa and run by nuns. But what was mother running from when she ran into the path of the horses at the Palio, Siena’s famous race? And what is so important about the bone locket she made for Sofia - which has been stolen?

Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s dark and delightful new fantasy story for 9-12 year olds is full of beautiful detail and perfect for children with a taste for the gothic. Historic, plague-beset Siena and its spooky catacombs is an intriguing and atmospheric setting, but it’s the sensitive story of a lone mother and her two children in perilous times that is the real heart of the story. Plenty of action and peril for impatient readers, and lovely description for those of an imaginative nature.

About the author

Kiran Millwood Hargrave was born in Surrey in 1990, and her earliest ambition was to be a cat, closely followed by a cat-owner or the first woman on Mars. She has achieved only one of these things, but discovered that being a writer lets you imagine whatever you want.

She started writing poetry in her final year at university, producing three poetry books and a play before she turned to fiction. Her bestselling debut The Girl of Ink & Stars, about a mapmaker’s daughter who must save her island, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2017 and the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year. Her second standalone story, The Island at the End of Everything, was shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children’s Book Award, and long listed for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. Her third book, The Way Past Winter, was the Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Year 2018.

Kiran lives in Oxford with her husband, the artist Tom de Freston, and the fulfilment of one of her earliest ambitions: their cat, Luna.

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