Under the Mountain

Description

When Theo and Rachel Matheson head for Auckland to spend a fortnight with their uncle and aunt, they are prepared for the usual entertainments that the city can provide. But their relatives have curious neighbours who seem to take an unusual interest in the red-haired twins. And once they meet the extraordinary Mr Jones, their holiday begins to take a course of its own. Beneath extinct volcanoes giant creatures are waking from a spellbound sleep of several thousand years. Their goal is the destruction of the world. Time is running out. The Matheson twins, chosen to oppose the monsters, know themselves to be as fallible as any other eleven-year-olds ...This children's classic by award-winning Maurice Gee is now a major motion picture event.

Maurice Gee has long been considered one of New Zealand's finest writers. He has written more than thirty books for adults and young adults and has won numerous literary awards, including the UK's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the Wattie Award, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the New Zealand Fiction Award and the New Zealand Children's Book of the Year Award. In 2003 he received an inaugural New Zealand Icon Award and in 2004 he received a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. Maurice Gee's novels include The Plumb Trilogy, Going West, Prowlers, Live Bodies and The Scornful Moon. He has also written a number of much-loved children's novels, including Under the Mountain, The O Trilogy and The Salt Trilogy. Maurice lives in Nelson, in New Zealand's South Island, with his wife Margareta, and has two daughters and a son.