Winner of the 1997 Whitbread Children's Novel Award
Entertainingly written, prize-winning Aquila is an exciting adventure. On a boring school trip, Tom and Geoff discover an ancient flying machine. Determined to find out more about it but also desperate to keep their find a secret, the boys return to the spot and, having mastered how to fly the thing, are soon off on incredible travels in a ship with strange powers including the ability to make them invisible. Along the way, they even have to learn some Latin for purposes of communication. Soundly based in a convincing everyday setting, Aquila is also a tightly plotted and well-imagined adventure.
It's a spaceship from the past - can it change the future? Aquila has been found by boys bunking off a geography field trip. They have no idea where it came from or what it does. But Geoff's discovered that when you sit in it these little coloured lights come on, and if you push one of the big blue ones ...Whoosh!
This original story is gripping from the first page, when two boys slip down a bank into a disused quarry while on a school orienteering trip. There they discover a Roman spacecraft, which they manage to get going. They learn more while finding out how to control the spaceship than they have ever learnt at school - including Latin! Winner of the 1997 Whitbread Children's Novel Award, short-listed for the Smarties Award, it has also been made into a popular television series. (9-11 yrs) Kirkus UK
Author
About Andrew Norriss
Andrew Norriss was born in 1947, went to Trinity College, Dublin, and then became a school teacher because a woman called Mrs Morrison told him to. In 1982, another woman told him he should be a writer, so he did that instead, partly because of the money, but mostly because it means you can watch movies in the afternoon.
He lives in a thatched cottage in a little Hampshire village with a loving wife and two wonderful children, and life would be pretty near perfect if he could just get rid of the moles on the lawn, and his son didn’t leave marmalade dribbling down the side of the jar so that it stuck on your fingers when you picked it up in the morning.
