Anna is twelve, and she has already killed a man. Except he was not a man at the time. It is 1930 and the new decade is complicated, even in the depths of rural Oxfordshire.

An orphan from a faraway country, Anna lives with an old farmer named Gabriel who may be a demon, or an angel, or both. Her best friends are a doll named Pie and a werewolf. Her long-lost mother was an Anatolian witch, and there are those who say that in Anna the witchcraft lurks too.

She does not desire it. As she says to her friend C.S. Lewis, "All I want is for life to be normal, without complications. I just want to be an ordinary girl."

But she no longer lives in the ordinary world. Another has opened out beyond her own, beneath 1930's England. It is the Old World of myth and story, and it is not a fairy-tale. It is a darkness filled with eyes and teeth.