Sir Thursday - Garth Nix

Regular readers will know that I'm a big fan of both Garth Nix's The Old Kingdom series, and "The Keys to the Kingdom" series (Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday). The fourth book, Sir Thursday has recently been published and I got my hands on a copy on Saturday and read most of it the same day.

The story takes up where Drowned Wednesday left off. Dame Primus is now made up of the first three parts of the Will of the Architect, and Arthur and his school friend Leaf are intending to go back to their world in the Secondary Realms to find out if their families are surviving the Sleepy Plague. However, Arthur finds that he cannot return to his world as his place in it has been taken by a Spirit-eater, a creature created from the Nothing that surrounds the House, which is one of the Architect's chief creations. The Spirit-eater has the power to infect people in Arthur's world so that it can not only read their minds but also control them. Before Arthur can work out how to get back to his world, he find himself drafted into Sir Thursday's army, so Leaf volunteers to go back to their world to find the object from which the Spirit-eater was "grown" (a pocket ripped from Arthur's shirt during the events recounted in Mister Monday) so that Arthur can destroy it. Arthur, in the meantime, becomes an army recruit and finds himself facing an organised force of New Nithlings (again created from the Nothing) who threaten to break out of the Great Maze in which the Nithlings are habitually fought, to take over the whole of the Architect's realm. Both Arthur and Leaf face a race against time to achieve Arthur's objective of gaining control of the Fourth Key and releasing the fourth part of the Will from Sir Thursday's governance.