It was while sorting out papers belonging to his father, Paul Torday, the author of the international hit Salmon Fishing in the Yemen , that Piers Torday found a hand-drawn map of a mysterious fantasy land. What his father intended to do with this world, we shall never know — he died in 2013, aged 67, without exploring it in his novels — but the map inspired his son to create Princeland, the perilous backdrop to his own bold and ambitious gothic fantasy. Its refusal to talk down to young readers while delivering a good old-fashioned highbrow quest might invite comparisons with Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy or Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell.
But really, at heart, Midnight Treasure feels like The Hobbit — with.