12 Feb Meet the fantasy adventure novel set in Britain’s Most Extraordinary Home
To some, Essex’s Talliston House & Gardens is Britain’s Most Extraordinary Home, now a YA fantasy adventure novel set at the home is set to launch!
Equal parts Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, His Dark Materials and The Lion, Witch And The Wardrobe, The Stranger’s Guide To Talliston is a classic tale of adventure that introduces readers to an otherworld hiding in plain sight, cloaked in magic and steeped in imagined history. Yet it contains the message of the project itself, and encourages children to discover the secret that lies within all of us – the power to live extraordinary lives.
THE HOUSE
The setting for this novel is a real-life house that’s been on quite an extraordinary journey itself. It began in 1990, with the UK’s most ordinary house: a three-bedroomed, semi-detached, ex-council house in Great Dunmow, Essex. Over the next 25 years, more than 130 volunteers, artists and artisans transformed it into Talliston House & Gardens. Now that Talliston is internationally famous and dubbed ‘Britain’s Most Extraordinary Home’, it has inspired this amazing adventure.
THE STORY
Abandoned and alone, thirteen-year-old Joe’s world is shattered when he enters a deserted council house and becomes trapped within a labyrinth protecting the last magical places on earth. There, Joe discovers The Stranger’s Guide, a cryptic book charting this immense no-man’s land and his only map through its dark and dangerous puzzle of doors and rooms. Hunted by sinister foes, Joe is forced ever deeper into both the maze and the mystery of his missing parents. What lies at the labyrinth’s centre and will it reunite him with the family he so desperately needs?
