Zam Haley

Zam Haley remembers his grandfather, Pops, as something of a superhero; a wondrous man with inexplicable powers that were only ever revealed to Zam himself in the form of trickery, games and fun-filled mischief. When Pops' health takes a turn for the worse and the Haley family move to the tiny and remote forest town of Pinestump to be with him, Zam's curiosity leads Pops to reveal to him the truth behind the ancient history of Earth and its oldest inhabitants - the mysterious Geona.

Zam learns that the Geona were a small species of people who once populated the Earth for millions of years and had the ability to physically merge with any animal species, courtesy of their elastic DNA, and were able to control the merged entity to improve their ability to hunt, gather and survive. They had a fondness for the pre-human apes, thanks to their opposable thumbs and expressive faces, and over the millennia gradually nurtured intelligence in the emerging human race. Adult early humans all over the continent were once each paired with a Geona, and the merged brain gave them access to the full energy potential of every cell within their bodies. They could run at speed, manipulate fire and even fly (if they could stand the pain) and lived in symbiotic harmony for thousands of generations with their Geona friends. Then one day, over a hundred thousand years ago, the Geona all vanished in an instant, without a trace, and as the last story of them faded from ancient human memory, it became as though they never existed at all.

Zam is enthralled by the story of the Geona and the revelation that Pops himself had, until very recently, been living with one for decades, after discovering a tiny community of surviving Geona in the remote forest near Pinestump as a young forest ranger. Zam sets out in search of the little people and, discovering more secrets than he bargained for, must team up with some new-found friends to save the Earth from the paranoid Emperor Vane in an epic adventure spanning two worlds.