The first book in the Inkheart trilogy was published in 2003 and Funke believes this is one of her best efforts. "There are those people who love books and are greedy for books and the rustling of paper and the printed letter and I wanted to write about this. This love for the printed word. And I think Inkheart is all about that. The enchantment that comes from books."
In Inkheart , twelve-year-old Meggie loves books so much that she regularly falls asleep with them. Her father, Mo, teases her, saying, "I'm sure it must be very comfortable sleeping with a hard, rectangular thing like that under your head." But Meggie enjoys taking her books to bed because the books whisper their stories to her at night. Books are also important to her father, who earns his living by traveling across the country repairing and caring for old volumes. He does not, however, read to his daughter because of a secret power he possesses: if Mo reads a book aloud, its characters leave the pages and enter the real world. Mo discovered his gift several years earlier, when he released characters from the book Inkheart. One of them, named Capricorn, is so evil that his heart is said to be made of ink. Capricorn hunts down Mo because he wants to destroy Inkheart, ensuring that he will never return to its pages.
Inkheart debuted on The New York Times Bestseller list and stayed on it for quite some time. It was even turned into a movie a few years after its release.
