John Christopher Libri

After his father's death Luke lives with the Seers in the Sanctuary waiting for the time he will be able to take his rightful place as Prince of Winchester

In prehistoric times, a boy from a hunting tribe meets a girl from an enemy tribe of farmers. A reader for students of English as a foreign language

Fourteen-year-old Laurie and his family attempt to flee England when the Tripods descend from outer space and begin brainwashing everyone with their hypnotic Caps

The Fratellini Winter they had called it, after the Italian scientist who had first detected the decline in solar radiation. The seasons pass and the cold bites ever harder. The Thames freezes over, stocks of food and fuel run low, and London falls under martial law. That first arctic winter, it seems, was only the beginning, the herald of the incoming Ice Age. Andrew Leedon has problems of his own. Forced out of his marriage, he joins the exodus of the privileged few with the necessary influence to escape to the warmth of the African sunshine. But gone, he finds on arrival in Lagos, are the glory days of Empire. The desperate influx of European refugees has enabled the natives to turn the tables on their former colonial masters: it is white men now who, from their shanty-town hovels, serve at table and labour on construction sites, white women who empty the bed-pans and sell their bodies. Their Nigerian bosses, meanwhile, looking towards the lawless, ice-bound north, have their own plans for expansion.

Five people enter the Frohnberg caves, three men and two women. In the glare of the Austrian sunshine, the cool underground depths seem an attractive proposition – until the collapse of a cave wall blocks their return to the outside world. Faced with an unexplored warren of tunnels and caves, rivers and lakes, twisting and ramifying under the mountain range, they can only hope that there is an exit to be found on the other side. For Cynthia, the journey through the dark labyrinths mirrors her own sense of guilt and confusion about the secret affair she has recently embarked upon. And whilst it is in some ways a comfort to share this possibly lethal ordeal with her lover Albrecht, only her husband Henry has the knowledge and experience that may lead them all back to safety. But can even Henry’s sang froid and expertise be enough, with the moment fast approaching when their food supplies will run out, and the batteries of their torches fail, leaving them to stumble blindly through the dark?