The Hazel Wood

My mum and I lived like vagrants, staying with friends til our welcome ore through at the elbows, perching in precarious places, then moving on. We didn't have the luxury of being nostalgic. We didn't even have the chance to stand still. Until the year I turned seventeen and Althea died in the Hazel Wood. Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice's life on the road, always a step ahead of the strange bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice's grandmother, the reclusive author of a book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate - the Hazel Wood - Alice learns how bad her luck can really get. Her mother is stolen away - by a figure who claims to come from the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother's stories are set. Alice's only lead is the message her mother left behind: STAY AWAY FROM THE HAZEL WOOD. To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother's tales began . . .