Fingal’s Ghost, by Kathleen Fidler, is a wartime adventure in which plucky children foil a German spy plot involving a submarine. My forthcoming book, The Wreck of the Argyll, is a wartime adventure in which plucky children foil a German spy plot involving a submarine. But, honest, I read Fingal’s Ghost just recently, long after I’d… Read More
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Magic is hard. There’s so much magic in fantasy that sometimes it’s used to define fantasy (although that’s an oversimplification) but the fact remains – Magic is hard. There are many books where the magic just doesn’t hang together, or where the reader is bogged down in the minutiae of the cleverly-worked-out magic system that the… Read More
The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean, by Lindsay Littleson, was the winner of the 2014 Kelpies Prize. And no wonder. It has engaging characters and an exciting plot that zips along at a cracking pace – I read through it in one session last night after it automagically appeared on my Kindle a week earlier… Read More
(Part one here.) We drove up to Dundee the day before the ceremony. It’s nearly 400 miles from Leicester to Dundee, but I’ve done the trip dozens of times before – Sandra’s family still live in Dundee, so we go up to visit them every year. I didn’t get an awful lot of sleep that… Read More
I’ve been writing for more years than I care to remember, but it’s really only been the last three years that I’ve applied myself wholeheartedly with the aim of seeing my work published. I’m not sure how many works-in-progress I’ve got cluttering up my hard drive – books I started, then came to a crashing… Read More