Eva Ibbotson Star of kazan

Eva Ibbotson's hugely entertaining The Star of Kazan is a timeless classic for readers young and old.

In 1896, in a pilgrim church in the Alps, an abandoned baby girl is found by a cook and a housemaid.

They take her home, and Annika grows up in the servants' quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric Viennese professors.

She is happy there, but dreams of the day when her real mother will come to find her.

And sure enough, one day a glamorous stranger arrives at the door.

After years of guilt and searching, Annika's mother has come to claim her daughter, who is in fact a Prussian aristocrat whose true home is a great castle.

But at crumbling, spooky Spittal, Annika discovers that all is not as it seems in the lives of her new-found family .