About the book...

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF WOLF TIDE... 17 year-old ANABARA NOLIO is descended from a long line of warriors. From the Gull People on her father’s side she has the ability to fly, and from her highborn Galen mother she has access to the world of the privileged elite. She is a also a Private Investigator. When tasked with discovering the truth about the University library’s lost books she thinks it’s a simple case. But the city isle of LARIDY is riddled with dark secrets and ancient magic - a legacy from historic dealings with the Realm of the Fairy...

Saturday 14 December 2013

DREAMS OF FLYING

Don't you wish you could fly?  Funny how in our dreams we know how to do it.  Maybe it comes from our experience of looking off high buildings, or down from aeroplanes.  Here’s a dizzying picture I took from a cable car in Barcelona in the summer:

  

Or maybe our knowledge of flying is buried somewhere in our DNA?  Michael Symmons Roberts touches on that idea in his poem 'Mapping the Genome':
            Somewhere out there are remnants
            of our evolution, genes for how
           
            to fly south, sense a storm
            hunt at night, how to harden
            your flesh into hide or scales.

(You can read the whole poem here:

When I was a little girl my sisters and I used to make ourselves cardboard wings and pretend we could fly.  Or we’d jump off high walls in our Robin Hood cloaks, hoping to get airborne that way.  But no.  Part of me has never quite given up hope.  Maybe in Heaven?  Well, the next best thing was to create characters who can fly; hence the Gull people in Wolf Tide.  Here’s what my heroine Anabara says about it:

‘…it wasn’t really hard work. Not if you were small and light. No worse than running down hill with the wind behind you. Nothing beat that rush. Like diving upward into an airy sea. Rooftops, here we come!’


Sunday 1 December 2013

PUBLICATION DAY

I had a great time in Liverpool Cathedral yesterday evening launching Wolf Tide.  Lots of friends and family, lots of copies of the book, and some wonderful singing by Liverpool Cathedral Youth Choir.  My teenage niece went off with a copy of the book when we got home, sat on my stairs and read it cover to cover.  She appeared in the kitchen and said, When's the sequel coming out?  Now that's the kind of reader I like.