The Casket of Time is a fantastical tale of time travel and environmental calamity. Teenage Sigrun is sick of all the apocalyptic news about the “situation” and, worse, her parents’ obsession with it. Sigrun’s family—along with everyone else—decides to hibernate in their TimeBoxes®, hoping for someone else to fix the world’s problems . But when Sigrun’s TimeBox® opens too early, she discovers an abandoned city overrun by wilderness and joins a band of kids who are helping a researcher named Grace solve the “situation.” The world, according to Grace, is under an ancient curse. There once was a princess named Obsidiana, who was trapped in time by the greedy king of Pangea. To protect Obsidiana from dark and gloomy days, the king put her in a crystal casket made of spider silk woven so tightly that time itself couldn’t penetrate. The king’s greed for power doomed his kingdom and the trapped princess. Sigrun sees eerie parallels between the tale of Obsidiana and the present-day crisis, and realizes it’s up to her and her friends to break the ancient curse and fix the world.
Author
Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer, born in Reykjavik on July 14, 1973. An award winning author published in 40 languages. His most recent book is On Time and Water - a book seeking to explore the issue of time and climate change through language, mythology and memoir. Andri has written novels, poetry, plays, short stories, essays and he has directed documentary films. His novel LoveStar was chosen as “Novel of the year” by Icelandic booksellers, it received the DV Literary Award, The Philip K. Dick special citation Award of 2013 and won the french Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire as best foreign Sci-Fi in France 2016. His children’s book, The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic Literary Prize and has been published or performed in 35 countries. His first book of poetry was a runaway best seller published by the Bonus supermarket chain in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet received the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award 2000 and the West Nordic Children’s Book Prize 2002 and the Green Earth Honor Award 2013 and the UKLA Award 2014. The play from the story was performed on the main stage of YPT in Toronto in 2005 and 2013. He has been active in the fight for preserving the delicate nature of Iceland, his book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation takes on these issues. Dreamland has been made into a feature-length documentary film. Andri Magnason is the winner of the Kairos Award of 2010 granted by the Alfred Toepfer institute in Hamburg. His most recent documentary films are The Hero's Journey to the Third Pole - a bipolar musical documentary with elephants and Apausalypse, available on the website of Emergence Magazine. Andri Snær Magnason lives in Reykjavík. He is married with four children. His work has been published to more than 40 languages.
