Sally and the Night Doors

Sally is eight and she has a plan. Stay awake, catch the tooth fairy, see the wings. She has the torch. She has the tooth. She has Rory the wolfhound, who already knows something is coming.

The fairy who arrives has no wings worth mentioning. What she has is a ledger, a pair of silver calipers, and the air of someone who has been doing this job since before anyone alive was born. Her name is Vespera. Sally's tooth, she explains, is not a coin-swap. It is a key.

What it opens is a museum — not of paintings or artefacts, but of everything childhood leaves behind when it grows up. Forgotten imaginary friends. Jars of playground laughter from 1924. Kites whose owners stopped running. Drawers of first drawings. A lost-and-found where nothing has ever been claimed.

Tonight, a Runaway Dream has escaped its jar. It belongs to a boy who has stopped looking up at the sky. If Sally and Vespera don't return it before dawn, it will dissolve — and the boy will wake up with a hole in his heart where a wonder used to be.

Sally and the Night Doors is the first book in the Moonbeam Stables series. It is for children who are eight and for adults who remember being eight and feel the ache of that. It is for anyone who has ever put something under a pillow and hoped for more than a coin.