A strange friendship develops between a young Chinese refugee who is spending the summer at Green Knowe and a gorilla who has escaped from the London Zoo.
Tolly comes to live with his great-grandmother at the ancient house of Green Knowe and becomes friends with three children who lived there in the seventeenth century.
The inhabitants of Green Knowe become involved with black magic when a modern-day witch attempts to find books of witchcraft supposedly hidden in the old house by a mad seventeenth-century alchemist.
While eagerly following each stage of the new stone manor house his father is building to replace their old wooden Saxon hall, a young boy, part Saxon and part Norman, becomes involved with ancient magic that carries him through time.
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