The House with Chicken Legs (Paperback)

Shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2019

Shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2019

Waterstones Children's Book of the Month for May 2018

A spellbinding adventure, bound-up with traditional folk and fairy tales, The House with Chicken Legs transports readers to a world of spells and spirits bound by ancient rules and one girl who longs to break free.

My house has chicken legs. Two or three times a year, without warning, it stands up in the middle of the night and walks away from where we’ve been living. It might walk a hundred miles or it might walk a thousand, but where it lands is always the same.

Marinka dreams of a normal life, she dreams of standing still, but her house has chicken legs and a will of its own and moves on without warning.

For governing Marinka’s world is the powerful and feared Baba Yaga. To some she is a witch, to others the Goddess of Death who guides spirits between this world and the next and she is also Marinka's grandmother.

Marinka longs to change her destiny and sets out to break free from her grandmother's footsteps, but her house has other ideas...

Based on the Slavic fairy tales she was told by her own Prussian grandmother, Sophie Anderson’s debut is both a powerful reimagining of ancient storytelling and an entrancing new story of one girl’s search for freedom and her own calling. Accompanied by beautiful internal illustrations by Elisa Paganelli, it is a celebration of the power of storytelling to weave new spells and keep magic alive for every new generation.