In 1896 in a pilgrim church in the Alps an abandoned baby girl is found by a cook & a housemaid They take her home & Annika grows up in the servants' quarters of a house belonging to three eccentric Viennese professors She is happy there but dreams of the day when her real mother will come to find her & sure enough one day a glamorous stranger arrives at the door After years of guilt & searching Annika's mother has come to claim her daughter who is in fact a Prussian aristocrat whose true home is a great castle But at crumbling spooky Spittal Annika discovers that all is not as it seems in the lives of her new-found family Eva Ibbotson's hugely entertaining The Star of Kazan is a timeless classic for readers young & old