Hardinge gives the opposing Puritans a similar kind of treatment, with their inconsistencies and excesses laid bare, and it is to her great credit that she delineates the attractions and horrors of both sides, symbolised in the characters of James, a bastard tempted by nobility, and Symond, the noble heir who seems to shift allegiance. It is not hard to see a critique of aristocracy: should some families, here quite literally in thrall to their ancestors through their ghosts, be any more suited to power than others? The damage done as a result is incalculable. Hardinge is adept and vivid in creating a sense of terrifying, apparently permanent grandeur: the Fellmotte house, Grizehayes, is ancient, implacable and vast Lady April, one of the family, treads over the outstretched palms of an underling rather than get her dress wet. Her heroine in Cuckoo Song was a fairy changeling, unaware that she had been created and placed into the family that she thought hers Faith in The Lie Tree must fight against the strictures placed on women in the 19th century, while unpicking a web of falsehoods around her scientist father.

Hardinge has always been interested in splits and doubles in how a character, apparently good, can be only a sliver away from being bad in how perceptions and opinions shift according to perspective and situation. Her darkly splendid new book is a worthy follow-up to The Lie Tree, set just before the start of the English civil war.

What is more, she combines a subtle, intellectual approach with plots that swoop and soar. Hardinge is at the forefront of children’s fiction, with a rich, unusual taste for language, an eye for the striking and apt image and stories that reveal a staunch defence of the weak and the oppressed. F rances Hardinge’s last novel, The Lie Tree, won the overall Costa book award in 2015 the only other children’s book to have done so is Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, in 2001.

A skinful of shadows frances hardinge