William, Mary and Alice Constant have come to spend Christmas with their uncle as their parents are working abroad. Little by little, they discover that things in this remote old house are not quite what they seem. There are powerful forces at work, calling to the children from across the centuries; forces that pull them up the hidden steps in the chimney to the secret room where the magician lives.

 

There are 272 pages in this book. This book was published 2012 by Random House Children's Publishers UK .

William Corlett grew up in Yorkshire. After training at RADA, he worked as an actor in the theatre and on television before devoting himself full-time to writing. His teen-novel The Gate of Eden was successfully dramatised in the 1970s, and he won an Emmy for his dramatisation of The Magician's House for the BBC.