The Geometric Man
A fictionalised version of the young Jules Verne grows up in a world too small for his restless imagination. Spending a summer in a quiet French village, he stumbles upon a mysterious inventor and a locked shed full of blueprints, tools and machines unlike anything he’s ever seen. As Jules becomes the inventor’s apprentice, he finds himself drawn into a secret project: designing a prototype for a mechanical man powered not by gears, but by geometry and thought. Along the way, Jules must face sceptical villagers, dangerous accidents and his own fears of failure. When the invention seems on the brink of collapse, it is Jules’ spark of curiosity and daring ideas that push the project forward.
This thrilling, tender story captures the moment when a boy obsessed with maps, logic and dreams begins to believe in his own voice — and in a future built one brilliant idea at a time.
In the Footsteps of the Great Classics is a fresh, clever and inventive middle-grade series, edited by Guido Sgardoli, that aims to introduce young readers to different narrative genres through the lens of classic authors’ childhoods. Not the original classics, but new stories by contemporary writers, inspired by real or imagined events in the early lives of classic authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and Agatha Christie. Each volume mixes biography, fiction, and genre exploration — adventure, horror, sci-fi, and mystery — with a final section of writing games and activities.
By the same author or illustrator
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Haven’s End
A sealed world. A forbidden line. A truth powerful enough to burn everything down. Sixteen-year-old Rebecca has never questioned the rules of Haven’s End — an isolated, self-sufficient settlement lost in the forests of North America. Until the day she crosses the Red Line and discovers the first crack in the only world she’s ever known. What begins as a…
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The House of Light
At the edge of the sea, a tower keeps stories that the world has forgotten. A long time ago, at the edge of the known world, brave men built a tower, and at its top they lit a fire to hold back the darkness. Since then, the House of Light has watched over the horizon, witnessing storms and shipwrecks, ghosts…
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The Cursed Idol
A sharp, haunting coming-of-age novel about identity, temptation, and the price of wanting too much. Daniel doesn’t fit in – not at home, not at school, not even in his own skin. Then, in an abandoned villa, he finds a stone idol with human hair and a stitched mouth. A note warns: it gives with one hand, but takes with…
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Alligator’s Sense
Larry Nowak tries to avoid looking in the mirror as much as possible — the reflection staring back at him is only a pale shadow of the man he once was. Six and a half years spent in a hospital bed, in a kind of limbo he barely remembers. And the only way he found to escape what awaited him…
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Detour
When a group of strangers ends up in the same forgotten town in the Dolomites after a violent storm, they quickly realize that they are trapped — and something is terribly wrong. Italy, 2025. A sudden storm forces a number of people — families, tourists, cyclists, and commuters—to take a detour off the SS48. One by one, they all end…
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The Folio Club
Eleven students. An exclusive club. Dark secrets and fatal obsessions. They are dressed like the cursed poets. They gather in a boathouse they’ve claimed as their secret hideout. They drink punch and honey, smoke opium and gamble. Their motto is in Latin: sine fine sumus. They have nicknames like Edgar Allan Poe’s characters. They are members of the Folio Club, led by a charismatic…
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Syberia
Janis, a young Polish dissident, was sentenced to a Siberian labor camp after a failed student protest — which led to his arrest and the death of his father. Now, after two years, a mysterious cosmic explosion shatters the sky: the real-life Tunguska Event of 1908. In the chaos, Janis escapes into the vast, frozen taiga. Battling hunger, cold, wild animals,…
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The Beasts
Three deadbeat robbers with animal nicknames, Lynx, Buzzard and Toad, masked with rough cotton sacks slung over their heads, take shelter in the former Boeri sanitorium in Tresigallo. A coincidence leads them to cross paths with a class of Ferrara high school students on a trip to the old hospital and so they decide to take them hostage. The Boeri,…
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Anomalya
How many mistakes, how many wrong choices would we like to delete? How many words, how many silly things do we wish we hadn’t said? What if we could go back in time? What if we could change the past and finally take control of our future? There are many pasts and many futures, each shaped by a delicate domino effect: one…
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The Greys
1986, Cavazza, province of Belluno. Population: 102. No roller coasters. No cinemas. No holiday camps. Just trees, mountains and a cabin in the woods. Angelo would give anything not to follow his eccentric father Pietro on another wild goose chase. But he’s thirteen – he has no choice. And this time the mission is… to hunt aliens. Pietro is convinced that they have…
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The Phenomenal P.T. Heliodore
P.T. Heliodore is ten years old when he hears an animal speak for the first time. What begins as a surreal experience soon turns into something extraordinary: owls, beetles, a water snake, a blue cow on its way to New York, and a dog named Pinky all have something to say to him. P.T. has an imagination as big as the…
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Super Bomb & Captain Frizz vs the Little Poop Soldier
Two best friends. Secret identities. One mission: save the world. When a toy soldier falls into a clogged toilet and soaks up radioactive brown water, a new villain is born: the Poo Soldier—a giant, squishy, smelly monster with a mission to spread chaos and stink! As his army of brown zombies grows, only two kids with wild imaginations, super costumes, and…
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Super Bomb & Captain Frizz vs the Sausage-Man
Two best friends. Secret identities. One mission: save the world. Best friends Super Bomb and Captain Frizz dream of becoming superheroes — and when a radioactive jar of mustard falls into a butcher’s mincer, transforming a kindly butcher into the monstrous Sausage Man, their moment arrives! As Sausage Man unleashes chaos, the boys fight back with fizzy powder, clever tricks, and…
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The Stone
A circle of stones with dark powers, a wind-battered island and a boy looking for answers A haunting and emotionally charged mystery set on a remote Irish island. When a second death shakes the community, thirteen-year-old Liam begins to connect it to his mother’s recent, unexplained accident – and to a strange carved stone buried near both bodies. A bold,…
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The Mysteries of Mercurio 7 – Titian and the Wood of Shadows
An old man who lives in the top of a tower in the heart of Florence challenges three friends to a dangerous mission: to discover and solve the hidden mysteries of the art world! Mercurio is back! The room of the Venus of Urbino at the Uffizi is suddenly covered in moss and Nina, Jamal and Lorenzo find themselves in…
