Publisher's Synopsis
In The Desert in the Dining Room, a spectacular, eerily epic adventure novel for young readers, new author Stuart Wells combines the rarest aspects of engaging historical fiction with the supernatural in a spellbinding fantasy. With humor, shocking drama, and a lilting prose, this raucous, wildly imaginative debut is British to the core and does something altogether fascinating as it fuses the mid-nineteenth century to the modern world. As children dream the dreams of substance, a few lads and lasses must wage a battle against evil jinn and armies of the dead. When Captain Burnaby, a British officer serving in Afghanistan is killed in the Khyber Pass during the British Army's 1842 retreat from Kabul, he is offered a "dream" job in the afterlife. Drafted into Dreamwatch, a crackerjack corps of dream keepers, for centuries Barnaby skillfully protects the dreamy escapades of children all over the world until four young Brits' dreams take them to the Taklamakan Desert, one of the most remote and mysterious places on earth. Forced into a shocking, eyes-wide-open nightmare in which vicious warlord Yakub Beg and a hoard of evil Jinn will stop at nothing to rule the world by controlling the slumbering souls of children, all hope rests on the powers of a London schoolboy, whose coma leads him to the central Asian kingdom of Kashgaria, and three siblings who happen upon a spiral chamber in their home that transports them to the dark desert wasteland where they meet Mirza, a shaman, who is willing to take a few chances. As dreamers become dream warriors, the fate of many rests in the courage of these four young children.
