Chronoptika Quartet
4 primary works • 5 total works Complete
Book 1
Jake's father disappears while working on mysterious experiments with the obsessive, reclusive Oberon Venn. Jake is convinced Venn has murdered him. But the truth he finds at the snow-bound Wintercombe Abbey is far stranger ...
The experiments concerned a black mirror, which is a portal to both the past and the future. Venn is not alone in wanting to use its powers. Strangers begin gathering in and around Venn's estate: Sarah - a runaway, who appears out of nowhere and is clearly not what she says, Maskelyne - who claims the mirror was stolen from him in some past century. There are others, a product of the mirror's power to twist time. And a tribe of elemental beings surround this isolated estate, fey, cold, untrustworthy, and filled with hate for humans. But of them all, Jake is hell-bent on using the mirror to get to the truth. Whatever the cost, he must learn what really happened to his father.
Book 2
Time travel is sf. Fairies are folklore. What happens when you mix the two? And add a final ingredient, Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' ...?
On a mission to recover his father lost in time, Jake finds himself in 1940s London. From the rubble of the Blitzed city, a clue leads him to an eccentric seer of ghosts, three sinister children and three strange prophesies. Two of them soon come to pass, but what is the Box of Red Brocade? Does it hold the secret of destroying the Obsidian Mirror? A talking bird, an invisible girl, a walking wood; the second volume of Catherine Fisher's Chronoptika series is packed with mystery, magic and sinister intrigue.
'A new novel by Catherine Fisher, poet and prize-winning novelist is always worth looking out for. The Obsidian Mirror is both thriller and SF, and, being written in Fisher's acid-etched prose, equally satisfying to fans of many genres. 'Amanda Craig, THE TIMES Children's Book of the Week.
Book 3
TIME TRAVEL MEETS SCARY FAIRIES ... with Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream thrown in, from 'the leading lady of British fantasy' (The Times)
It's Midsummer Night, it's hot, and everyone in Wintercombe Abbey is dreaming strange and disturbing dreams. But what wakes Jake is the cold muzzle of a pistol pressed to his forehead. Who is the mysterious thief waiting for him beyond the Obsidian Mirror? And where will he find his father in the lost ages of the past?
In the third volume of the Chronoptika Quartet Jake and Sarah are swept into a nightmare world of revolution and murder, while Oberon Venn has to face the choice between staying mortal or losing his soul in the tangled green wildwood of the Shee.
With a masked ball, priceless emeralds, an enchanted monk and a desperate struggle at the very foot of the guillotine, Catherine Fisher continues her breathtaking series of sorcery and amazing worlds with this adventure of magic and the dangerous search for those who Time has snatched away.
Book 4
Science fiction, myth, time travel and Shakespearean wit and playfulness combine in a stunning sequence of huge imaginative power - the Shakespeare Quartet ...
The Speed of Darkness concludes the series which began with The Obsidian Mirror, then moved on through The Box of Red Brocade and The Door in the Moon.
In this final volume, a great storm brews out at sea and batters the Devon coast, flooding vast swathes of land. At Wintercombe Abbey the preceding weeks have been spent in a ferment of experimentation, as Jake Wilde's father, David and Maskelyne work furiously on Operation Leah. They have been practising changing tiny events in the past, in preparation for the rescue of Venn's wife Leah from death, the culmination of their work with the Obsidian Mirror. But in the aftermath of the storm, the Abbey is a drowned house. Where is the Mirror? What has happened to the two halves of the Janus coin? Whose is the mysterious boat wrecked up on the nearby beach? And what plans of mischief and mayhem lay in store for Halloween - the day chosen for Leah's return?
The Chronotoptika is a dazzling new quartet blending myth, science and time travel. Journey into the Chronoptika with this free sampler of Door in the Moon, with the first three chapters of Door in the Moon and bonus material from the author.
Jake's father, David Wilde, has disappeared whilst working for the strange recluse, Oberon Venn. A once famous explorer and collector of antiquities, Venn has withdrawn from the world following the death of his wife. He is obsessed with the desire to re-enter time, travel back, change the past, and resurrect his wife. This is the project on which Jack's father was working, and during which he disappeared. Venn fills his house with objects from his journeys into the past, and through his time-travel device, the Obsidian Mirror.
Jake's aim is to recover his father - no matter what - and he ventures into the periods when his father was reputedly last seen alive. Victorian London, then the Blitz of the Second World War. By Door in the Moon he is in 1798 Paris, on the eve of the French Revolution ...