Dustfinger has his own reasons: He wants Mo to help him find a way back into Inkheart the real world is too painful for him to take. One of Capricorn's associates, Dustfinger, lures Mo, Meggie and Elinor to come to a village in northern Italy, where Capricorn and his gang reside. They find refuge at the home of Meggie's aunt, a bookworm named Elinor. Mo and his 12-year-old daughter Meggie are on the run, trying to escape Capricorn's sphere of influence. Capricorn leads a gang of arsonists and blackmailers, whose main aim is to get a hold of every copy of Inkheart in the world - at all cost - and destroy them. Inkheart is a book within a book - in this case, it's the novel from which Capricorn was liberated.

Funke is a trained illustrator and provides drawings for her own books Image: Dressler Verlag/Cornelia Funke However, this gift turns out to be somewhat of a curse Mo has unwittingly brought some sinister characters to life - such as the villain Capricorn. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.' Cornelia Funke's books are celebrated around the world Image: picture-alliance/Eventpress Hoenschįunke proves herself to be a talented disciple of Michael Ende, who had also used the physical books as his connection between the imaginary and real worlds in his books.Īt the heart of Funke's story is Mortimer, known as Mo, a bookbinder with a rare gift: Mo is able to bring to life the characters he reads about in books. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. 'Perhaps there's another much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. That keyhole, it turns out, are books themselves. These two fictive realms, however, relate to each as if they were linked through a keyhole. Much like many other fantasy novels, Cornelia Funke's books also highlight the stark contrasts between the real world in fiction and the world of the imagination. Two years later, she published Inkspell and another two years on, Inkdeath.

Published in both German and English in 2003, Inkheart was immediately so successful that Funke decided to turn it into a trilogy.

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Inkheart by Cornelia Funke