LITMIR.BIZ

      Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2011

      Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it arethe work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      ISBN: 9780007425037

       EBook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007425044

       Version: 2017-08-14

       Dedication

      For my Fairy Godmother, Sarah Kelly

      Contents

       Title Page

       Copyright

Dedication

       Girl in the Mirror

       The Memory Maker

       Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      PS – don’t forget to read Cecelia’s other novels

       About the Publisher

       ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ (Alice)

       ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

       Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

       Girl in the Mirror

      JULY 1992

      ‘Grellie, Grellie, I’m here.’ Lila knocked on the door, excitedly. She hopped from one foot to the other and felt her white cotton sock slip from above her knee and tickle her skin as it slithered down to rest in an exhausted heap around her ankle, like a drunken fireman down a pole. She pulled her underwear out from between her cheeks, blew her feathery hair, which was stuck to her wet lips, and rapped again on the door with her now red knuckles.

      ‘Why do you call her Grellie?’ the little girl beside her finally spoke up. Her voice was tiny beside the gigantic front door. She noticed that and moved closer to Lila for safety. Protection against what she wasn’t sure.

      The front garden they had walked through was a jungle; untamed and unkempt, not like Sarah’s garden at all, where their gardener came every two weeks to make sure everything was symmetrical and perfect, and winked at her whenever he saw her at the window. She would marry him if she was old enough. But this garden was different. She felt she’d have gotten lost for ever if she’d stepped off the randomly placed flagstones that led to the front door. The deep-scented wild flowers stretched above her, all nosy to see inside the house as though they were fighting for space. The trees’ branches arched out and contorted in such disturbing angles they made Sarah shudder.