Wyntertide picks up a little while after the end of the first book, but the relief the Rotherweirders felt following Slickstone's demise does not last long. The story more than earns your assiduity, immersing the listener in a richly detailed world full of extraordinary characters; many of whom have double (or even quintuple) personas to keep track of across the centuries. Andrew Caldecott's ability to create and shape worlds and the characters in them, draws the reader into an intense narrative of plot and subtext that keeps you guessing. There are so many characters with weird and wonderful names, a great deal of complex rules and regulations, and such a wealth of history to explore, that it was a little overwhelming at first.

The company of quirky heroes are all rather passive: their most significant skills appear not to be combat or strategy but rather anagrams and crossword solving! The town is otherwise a typical heritage attraction, with picturesque festivals, an ancient church and an Elizabethan manor. I enjoyed every minute of it and like every entertaining puzzle I’d be happy to reduce it back to pieces and start it all over again.You don’t need Sasha Laika’s gorgeously naive illustrations to visualise the eponymous river island town, with its drawbridge and portcullis, tottering high-rise oak-and-plaster towers. The characters are an eccentric, often disparate rabble, united by their fascination with Rotherweird's past and their growing determination to protect its future. While arguing for science, it delicately distils the ethical quandaries of tinkering with Nature, summoning the spectres of agribusiness, GM foods, deforestation and species extinction with allusive, devastating simplicity: "They do many things to living things.

It also has a fine, wonderfully carved building of the same vintage, Escutcheon Place, still occupied by the hereditary herald. A coracle race brings some colour to the day-to-day life of the town, as does the Midsummer Fair and, in the second book, Vulcan’s Dance and the elections.The second book was more rounded, giving the female characters a little more space, and evened out the pace a little bit more – as well as (apparently) killing off a number of significant characters. Coracle racing on the turbulent river Rother is a local passion; the beer is so good, it’s dangerous; and the municipal gardener, Hayman Salt, is a genius at nurturing the strange and beautiful hybrids he finds in the Lost Acre – nothing like them has ever been seen in the outside world. It’s very rare for me to read a series one book after the other as I usually get a bit of series fatigue and have to slot in another book to cleanse the palate a little bit. The story Caldecott tells amounts to a cautious, determined and unusually perilous inquiry to find out. With more twists and turns than a game of Snakes and Ladders played on a helter-skelter, it requires one's full attention.

Two inquisitive outsiders have arrived: Jonah Oblong, to teach modern history at Rotherweird School (nothinglocal andnothing before 1800), and the sinister billionaire Sir Veronal Slickstone, who hassomehowgot permission to renovate the town’s long-derelict Manor House. The Rotherweird trilogy stands out because it’s quirky, it has the most amazing cast of characters and it takes place in mysterious and enchanting surroundings. deeply impressive debut' by Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard and 'Vivid and absorbing and grapples with big ideas without being dry, difficult or patronising' by Sarah Hemming, in the Financial Times, but informed by his love o Andrew Caldecott is a QC specialising in media, defamation and libel law, as well as a novelist and occasional playwright.But appearances can be deceptive; deft and agile as its protean antagonist, this novel ultimately slips between polarised moralities to investigate something far more complex.