[Bookfinder filter] Trying to find a book I read at school, in the UK, in about 1987. It was a book for teenagers, with two interweaving stories across different times: one thread involved a teenage couple in modern times, and the other thread was about some Norse warriors, including a berserker, in ancient England. The two threads were tied together by an ancient axe head. The final section of the book was written in a cipher.
Bits I can remember: The berserker character hiding somewhere and holding the axe during some crisis, the teenagers in modern times finding the axe-head somewhere. The two teenagers meeting in a cathedral, and using a code to write to each other.
The reason I want to find the book: The last 10 or so pages were hand-written in a weird code based on rectangles and dots. It was the code that the teenage couple had used to write to each other, and I think the last 10 pages were a coded letter from one of them to the other. At the time when I first read the book, I could not crack the code, so I never found out how the book ended.
Years and years later, I realised that the characters must have been using the
Pigpen cypher - the book was quite sneaky in that it described how the code looked, but didn't give you enough info to actually translate it without outside help.
From what I remember, it was a pretty good book, and I'd love to track it down now and work out the ending.
This is all a bit of a longshot, but you never know with the power of the interwebs these days. Thanks!
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posted by MasonDixon at 2:41 PM on November 20, 2009