Just days before Christmas, young Kay Harker is travelling home from boarding school to spend the festive season with his guardian Claire Louise. Seemingly by chance, he encounters a friendly dog and then the dog’s mysterious master, but when they vanish and two suspicious-looking men board the train looking for them, Kay finds himself caught up in a struggle between good and evil for the possession of the most powerful magical artefact the world has ever seen, The Box of Delights.

The murderous magician Abner Brown has been hunting for the Box for years and will stop at nothing to get it. His wolves, and the villainous high-society thief Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her crew, have been tasked to find it at all costs. As the snow falls on the little town of Condicote, can Kay and his friends Maria and Peter really stop them?

Magic, spectacle and adventure abound in this seasonal tale as the three children find themselves in a desperate race against time to save Christmas and just possibly the world.

Written by the then Poet Laureate John Masefield in 1935, the original story was a sequel to an earlier book of his ‘The Midnight Folk’. Elegantly whimsical at times, the tale of children becoming involved in a magical world was a precursor to other stories that have become far more famous, such as C S Lewis’ ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ (‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ et al) which was first published in 1950, and J K Rowling’s cultural behemoth ‘Harry Potter’, which first saw light of day in 1997. There are definitely echoes of Masefield’s creations in both, and if you’re a fan of either, you’ll find much here to entertain you.

From Christmas carols to flying cars, this is festive family adventure at its finest.

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