Secrets of a Sun King

Emma Carroll's Secrets of a Sun King is an Egyptian mystery for 11 year olds about a London girl who finds a dead man's parcel waiting at her grandad's back door.

What happens

It's November 1922 and Lil is having a rotten week. She's the scholarship girl at a snooty school where nobody talks to her. Her grandad, the one person who really gets her, has just been rushed into hospital.

And the newspaper headline that morning is about human feet. A professor's feet were found on his hearthrug in Bloomsbury. The rest of him had simply burned away.

So when Lil goes round to feed Grandad's cat and finds a parcel from that same professor, she's properly spooked. Inside, wrapped in straw, is a golden jar with the head of Anubis on its lid. It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen, and it frightens her a bit.

Grandad can barely speak when she visits him. What he does manage to whisper is that the jar is cursed and has to go back to Egypt. Not ideal when you're a girl from a top-floor flat with no money for the bus!

It gets worse. Lil loses the jar within a day, when a girl called Tulip picks up the wrong satchel at the British Museum. Getting it back means knocking on the door of the most glamorous family she's ever met.

There's a second story woven through it too, and it's a real spine-tingler. The professor found a scroll inside the jar. It's written by Lysandra, a girl who reads dreams, about the last days of her friend Kyky. Kyky happens to be the boy king Tutankhamun.

All of this is happening while Howard Carter is digging for Tutankhamun's tomb and it's in every paper. That makes it feel so real. Lil is a great narrator too. She's fierce, always hungry and hopeless at looking neat for school.

A few things are worth being ready for. The burned professor is only described in the newspaper, but it's creepy. Grandad is very ill, coughing blood in a hospital ward, and it's upsetting for Lil to see. The war is never far away either, with men begging on street corners and a dad who won't talk about it.

What to read next

If your reader loves history with a shiver in it, Emma Carroll is a brilliant author to get to know. Frost Hollow Hall is another one. Tilly's pa is late home with the rent money, and the big house nearby lost its young heir to a frozen lake ten years before.