The location for the story is the Nine Worlds and the story itself draws heavily on Norse mythology. Runemarks was her first children’s novel and also her first venture into Epic Fantasy. Since then she has written an eclectic genre mix of bestsellers including two sequels to Chocolat, some cookbooks (co-written with Fran Warde) and some psychological thrillers including Gentlemen and Players and Blueeyedboy. However, she shot to fame in 1999 with her gastromance novel, Chocolat, which sold over a million copies and was made into an Oscar nominated film in 2000. Harris’ first two published works in the late 1990’s were gothic fantasy, but achieved only limited success. For suddenly her friend One-Eye, a rascally Outlander, want her to open Red Horse Hill and descend into World Below - a world filled with goblins and far worse - to retrieve a relic of the old gods.įirst published in 2007, Runemarks is a piece of crossover fantasy, designed to appeal to both adults and children, written by prolific, best-selling English author, Joanne Harris. Except for Maddy who thinks it’s rather fun. Born with a rusty-coloured rune on her hand - what the villagers call a ruinmark - she is scarred by this symbol of the old gods, a sign of magic.Īnd everyone known that magic is dangerous.

(Jan.Maddy Smith has always been an outsider. Maddy’s destiny, readers realize, is to remake the world, but to succeed she must first remake herself into someone worthy of that fate. Playing fast and loose with Norse mythology, she creates a glorious and complex world replete with rune-basedmagical spells, bickering gods, exciting adventures and difficult moral issues. Throughout, Harris demonstrates a knack for moving seamlessly between the serious and the comic, and her lengthy book moves swiftly. Then Maddy’s life is transformed when she meets first One-Eye, a mysterious traveler who agrees to train her in the ways of Faërie, and then Lucky, the trickster captain of the goblins under the hill. Such creatures are thick in the village because of its proximity to Red Horse Hill, a place of ancient power. Thorny and imaginative, she is believed to be a witch by the locals who would have cast her out long ago if she didn’t have a convenient talent for controlling the goblins that infest their cellars. Maddy, born with a rune of power on her hand, is deeply unpopular in her backwoods village. The supposed end of all things is now centuries past and the Middle World is ruled by the Order, a repressive theocracy reminiscent of the Magisterium in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass In her highly successful first children’s novel, however, the author of the bestselling Chocolat

In Norse myth the whole world ended with Ragnarók, the last battle, at which the gods were defeated and after which eternal winter descended.

Runemarks series in order