'Quite simply the best story of magic, love, sex, revenge and suspense to have come this way since Philip Pullman. Author: HEARN,LIAN Title: Across the Nightingale Floor Publisher: hodder sydney 2002 Description: first edition review copy 343pp NF (black cloth,review.

The first novel in the epic Tales of the Otori series, Across the Nightingale Floor is followed by Grass For His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon. He has love in his heart and death at his fingertips. But sixteen-year-old Otori Takeo, his family murdered by Iida's warriors, has the magical skills of the Tribe – preternatural hearing, invisibility, a second self – that enable him to enter the lair of the Tohan. Its surface sings at the tread of every human foot, and no assassin can cross it. In the great tradition of samurai revenge films, Across the Nightingale Floor follows the story of 16-year old Tomasu, known as Takeo, who in feudal Japan. In his palace at Inuyama, Lord Iida Sadamu, warlord of the Tohan clan, surveys his famous nightingale floor. Lian Hearn's stunningly powerful bestseller, Across the Nightingale Floor, is an epic story for readers young and old. Set in a mythical, feudal, Japanese land, a world both beautiful and cruel, the intense love story of two young people takes place against a background of warring clans, secret alliances, high honour and lightning swordplay.

The nightingale floor