When young siblings Alice and Seb face a terrible hardship that leaves them feeling utterly helpless and hope seems all but lost they make a discovery that changes their lives. A mysterious object in their house of curiosities takes them to the past.
The year is 1820, ferocious European empires rule great swathes of the world by sword, cannon and whip. However, people are not as obedient as the history books may have led you to believe. They resist. Revolutions rock the world, monarchies wobble and crumble whilst enslaved people rise up against their captors, forging new nations.
Our heroes must navigate the stormy seas between human trust and treachery on their quest to return to their family with a cure to try and save someone they love. On their epic journey they will see human good and evil at work. Their trust in others will be tested to the limit and their hearts broken in the face of human barbarity. They will be forced to make a series of complicated decisions and we can only hope that human goodness and love can shine through to help them when the situations they encounter plunge them into a past that is more difficult to escape than they had ever imagined.
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If you are hungry for a more intricate taster of the book I have added an excerpt from chapter 5 below. Enjoy!
As her dreams gave way to silence, Alice awoke with a start. Her eyes blinked in the blackness, her sweeping eyelids only managed to change its tone. The damp ground didn’t embrace her as a friend. This wasn’t the soft turf of her garden or the cool sand at the local creek, this ground was unknown.
She felt hot, wet and confused. She sat up and shivered against the overwhelming feeling of deep disorientation. Her neck ached. She felt as if she had just walked an entire day with a rucksack full of bricks and fought twelve rounds against a heavyweight boxer at the end. She turned her head to the left and then right, her contorted neck muscles contracted like springs and then released, relaxing like a sigh. The sensation of feeling began to flow back down her arms and legs like rainwater running along the gutter. Something else began to stir. This time it was up above. Her brain began to process, whirring silently back into action. Her capacity for thought snapped back, filling the dark void. Images of the last hour’s activity filled her mind at fast-forward pace, like when the internet comes back after it has lagged and the characters suddenly frenzy around the screen for a few seconds, catching up with the real-time position of the film. Suddenly, Alice lept up. A ten-ton thought crashed into her like a grand piano thrown from a twenty story rooftop. The pulsing tentacles of worry wrapped around her chest, taking her breath away. Her mind suddenly screamed at her, “Where am I? What the heck just happened? Where’s Seb!?”
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Alice wiped large beads of sweat from her brow. She could hear her heartbeat banging in her ears. She looked around frantically. Her other senses were now returning, allowing her to refocus on her surroundings in more detail. She could see some dim lights spread out in intervals atop a long, dark mass in the near distance. She blinked again, enabling a clearer view. Then, she gasped. The colour and tone of the lights were different to what she knew. These were not bright electrical lights, they were dimmer, orange lights which danced. These lights were produced by flame.
The lights must have been about half a mile away and helped silhouette a large stone wall which sat imposingly above the dark, rocky depths which fell away below. Alice lay back down, averting her eyes from the imposing walls and looked for something more real, more believable. Something she had seen a thousand times before. And there it was. The night sky, a friend she could always rely on in times of need. The imminent arrival of dawn had swept away some of the lower stars but further above, the deep blackness of space still contrasted against a billion bright, twinkly stars. Alice gasped again. She had never seen stars as bright or as numerous as these . At that very moment she remembered something her Dad had told her when they had looked at the stars together. His voice filled her head, “the truth lies in your heart, especially when you look at the stars.” She looked at the shining golden dots and smiled a hello at them, at her father and at herself. Her truth smiled back. Then her pounding heart skipped a beat. She remembered Seb.
The Bowden Report 