The Book of Sand

The first in an epic series created by one of our finest and most inventive storytellers, also known as the international bestseller Mo Hayder
Sand. A hostile world of burning sun.
Outlines of several once-busy cities shimmer on the horizon. Now empty of inhabitants, their buildings lie in ruins.
In the distance a group of people-a family-walks toward us.
Ahead lies shelter: a 'shuck' the family call home and which they know they must reach before the light fails, as to be out after dark is to invite danger and almost certain death.
To survive in this alien world of shifting sand, they must find an object hidden in or near water. But other families want it too. And they are willing to fight to the death to make it theirs.
It is beginning to rain in Fairfax County, Virginia, when McKenzie Strathie wakes up. An ordinary teenage girl living an ordinary life-except that the previous night she found a sand-lizard in her bed, and now she's beginning to question everything around her, especially who she really is ...
Two very different worlds featuring a group of extraordinary characters driven to the very limit of their endurance in a place where only the strongest will survive.


Mo Hayder left school at fifteen. Gifted with intelligence and determined to shape her own future she worked as an actress in TV and film, barmaid, security guard, filmmaker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator, and teacher of English as a foreign language in Asia. She had an MA in film from the American University in Washington, DC, and an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University, UK. She wrote eleven crime novels under the name Mo Hayder, and her fifth novel, Ritual, was nominated for the Barry Award for Best Crime 2009 and was voted Best Book of 2008 by Publishers Weekly. Gone, her seventh novel, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Two of her books, The Treatment and Ritual, have been made into films, and her novel Wolf was nominated for Best Novel in the 2015 Edgar Awards and is currently being adapted for the BBC. Prior to her diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease in December 2020, she had completed The Book of Sand and the first drafts of three more books in this series of speculative fiction, from which she took her greatest personal writing satisfaction. She passed away in July 2021 as a result of MND. She lived her life as a creative artist, never afraid to challenge her personal boundaries or those set by the establishment. She leaves behind a husband and daughter, a powerful legacy of books, and an incredible number of people who loved and admired the many facets of her diamond personality.