Jennifer Woodward

Zeuglodon Jennifer Woodward

A skeletal hand clutching an iron key lies hidden within a mermaid's wooden sarcophagus; a hand-drawn map is stolen from beneath the floorboards of an old museum. All while an eccentric inventor--the Sleeper--dreams of a passage to the centre of the hollow earth. And by dreaming, brings the passage into being....

Pursued by kidnappers thinking of riches and murder, Katherine Perkins and her two cousins must descend into the depths of the hollow earth in order to return the Sleeper to his ancestral home on the shores of Lake Windermere. But to awaken him might mean the end of his dream, the closing of the Windermere Passage, leaving the three intrepid explorers marooned in a savage land forgotten by time itself.

Zeuglodon, set in the world envisioned in James P Blaylock's The Digging Leviathan, is a landscape of colour, mystery, and adventure, in which reality and fantasy are shifting currents, and nothing is quite what it seems.