In the subsequent sections, each one dragging us further back in time, the characters of Eric, Merle and the priest recombine in various ways, playing out a story of Nietzschean eternal recurrence centred on the island. We're very pleased to be kicking off the official Midwinterblood Blog Tour next Monday, February 5th! The Unquiet Grave is a quietly sad and slightly unnerving ghost story; The Airman is a story of bravery in the Second World War concerning a downed pilot and a family who protect him; The Archaeologist is a story of a struggling group of archaeologists finding something which could make their careers; The Vampire is a dark and primal Gothic tale; The Painter is a quietly beautiful story about a friendship and the final story Midwinterblood explains the plot of everything that has happened so far. It plays with the ideas of past lives and what a person is willing to sacrifice for someone they love. In 2002 The Dark Horse was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, The Carnegie Medal and the Blue Peter Book Award.

And, most worryingly, why is Eric sleeping so much, and forgetting his reason for coming to the island for hours on end? When I read his chilling gothic mystery White Crow last year, it freaked me out--I couldn't believe the intensity of the emotional pitch, or how the persuasively suggestive writing played tricks with my perception.Maybe people say they're weird because his books don't have any of the content present in most of the popular YA books.

To tell you too much about the seven interconnected stories would be to give away too many of their delicious secrets.

Professionally, being a 4th grade teacher and reviewer, not a librarian, I tend to read only YA that really intrigues me for one reason or another and I have to shamefully admit that until now what I’d heard about Marcus Sedgwick’s books — that they were dark and creepy — did not make me want to read them.

I began "Midwinterblood" late one evening in bed, dreamed about it through the night and finished it early the next morning. But almost immediately we, the readers, realise that there is more than one mystery in this strange place. I think the largest issue I had with this book was its sparseness - it was both the best and the most problematic issue of the book. sounds like we're heading into a science fiction novel, but this is a 2073 that is, to my eye, almost indistinguishable from 2023, the year in which I am reading. For days he finds nothing, until a sixteen-year-old local boy named Eric tells Edward exactly where to dig.He used to play for two bands namely playing the drums for Garrett and as the guitarist in an ABBA tribute group. It has a promising premise in that there a seven different stories that are all interlinked and tale opens up as you progress, like the movie Cloud Atlas. I spent the day leading up to my book club discussion trying to figure out if I thought it was good-weird or bad-weird, but in the end, it was just. The book has an unconventional structure that someone told me is like Cloud Atlas, but while it does have a sort of similar time sense, I’d say it is otherwise completely different. It makes you work for the final answer you find in the epilogue, even though it's so simply constructed.

Finally we end up in the dark ages, with a chieftain reluctantly offering up his blood to save the island from famine. Eric cared far more about his painting/art than Merle and Merle cared more about the apples she found. In The Airman they didn't even meet, Eric was married to some other woman he loved (so much for his everlasting love for Merle! There is a main story that runs through the whole book which you start to find more and more out about as the story unfolds itself as you delve deeper into the history of the downright sinister island where it is set. Each reincarnation has a different short story of sorts and are all set on the mysterious Blessed island.

The book travels back in time telling the story of Merle and Eric's previous reincarnations via short stories, which means we see their characters in many different roles and come across many different facets of their personality. The Book of Dead Days was nominated for the Guardian Award, and was shortlisted for the Sheffield Book Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.