A young woman sleeps easily and peacefully on a damask bed, and there is a spindle on the floor. There is an old woman hobbling about the courtyard, and there are not many of the castle’s sleeping animals left.

There are thorns covering acres of land, old and dead near the castle walls, and crisply festooned with armoured skeletons nearer the outer edges. There is sleep, great billowing masses of it, creeping slowly towards the frontier. There are two countries barely half an hour apart as the crow flies, but the crow doesn’t fly that way because of the immense and spiky mountain range. There are dwarves carrying a precious jewel to buy provisions. This is ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ interbred with ‘Snow White’s Revenge’ to create a very unsettling plot that owes far more to Grimm than the Ladybird Fairy Stories. Gaiman has done his usual tricksy thing of reversing every damn element in a story to catch the reader out. There are pictures everywhere, so this is a Riddell book with captions by Gaiman, really. The dustwrapper is translucent, so you look through the thorns to see the sleeping princess beneath. Chris Riddell’s stunning line art has enchanted me ever since my children were reading the Edge Chronicles on repeat, but this is the first time I’ve bought one of his books for myself.

The Sleeper and the Spindle is, of course, a retelling of ‘The Sleeping Princess’ thorns, sleep, enchantment and all. The Sleeper and the Spindle may have been marketed as a children’s book, and I no longer dare buy my children books in case they already own them, or look at me pityingly for getting it wrong. I was abashed, but I can’t follow every author I like, can I? I explained that since I live abroad I have fewer ways of finding out what is creeping into bookshops without notifying me, and their look of ‘so you don’t Follow NeilHimself’s feed, then?’ diminished, slightly. I happened upon this beautiful Gaiman-Riddell collaboration from 2014 in the Cambridge branch of Forbidden Planet, and was looked upon strangely when I bore it back to my friends in triumph.

Chris riddell sleeper and the spindle