Burning Shadow
In the wilds of Bronze Age Greece, thirteen-year-old Hylas is sold as a slave, while his friend Pirra, daughter of the High Priestess, is determined to avoid being bargained off in marriage. Fate brings them together on a volcano, where they befriend an orphaned lion cub called Havoc. But their enemies are after them, and that volcano’s getting angry…
THE BURNING SHADOW is Book 2 in my new series, GODS AND WARRIORS. To research it I’ve climbed erupting volcanoes, scrambled down ancient mines, and met lions. I want these books to be so incredibly exciting that my readers can’t put them down. That’s why I do the research: to bring the stories alive and make children feel like they’re actually there.
You were born in Malawi, so do you have any memories of this before moving to the UK when you were little?
As we left when I was three, I’ve only got one memory: a vague image of a smiling African with a Christmas tree and a big, friendly Alsatian dog. The dog belonged to my parents, and when I was a baby, she sort of adopted me as her cub. I’ve often thought that she helped inspire my first series for 9-12-year olds, which began with WOLF BROTHER.
Your mother and father ran the Nyasaland Times, so can you tell us a bit about this?
From what I’ve gathered, Malawi, or Nyasaland as it then was, was an old-style British colony when we were there in the late 50s and early 60s: lots of tea on the lawn, and drinks at the club. My mother, who’s Belgian, had met my father when she went out to visit her sister, who’d married a tea-planter. In those days, Nyasaland was a very long way from everywhere, so my mother used to make her own clothes on an antiquated Singer sewing machine that was worked by a treadle. It came with us when we emigrated to England in 1963 (and in those days, that meant several weeks by ship!). The sound of the treadle is one of the sounds of my childhood. It wasn’t until the 1980s that my mother replaced it with an electric machine.
You studied Biochemistry at University, then went to work in a law firm – so at what point did you decide to leave this life and begin to write?
I’d started writing at University, and I knew it was what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t yet good enough to be published, so to earn a living, I became a lawyer – which was daft, as my heart wasn’t in it. But this was the early 80s, when women in the City were outnumbered five to one, so to begin with, I did enjoy making my mark, getting partnership, and earning lots of money. But the punishing hours and missed weekends took their toll, and the money became irrelevant, as I never had time to spend it.
The wake-up call came when my father died of cancer. He was amazing throughout his illness, getting the most out of the time he had left, without bitterness. But I knew then that I was wasting my own life, so I took a deep breath and chucked in the law. I was still working out my notice period and wondering how long I could survive on my savings, when I got the offer to publish my first novel, WITHOUT CHARITY. It was an enormous relief, and the happiest day of my life.
How long have you loved to write?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. I wrote my first story when I was five; I bashed it out on my mother’s typewriter, it’s called EBANEY THE MOUSE GODDESS. (The mouse village is menaced by a glacier, and as the god of the mice is out, the mouse goddess rides to the rescue on her horse…) After that, I always had a story on the go, or a play; I was forever persuading my school friends into acting in them. Slightly embarrassingly, my mother kept BARNEY THE MOUSE GODDESS. As mothers do.
Your first books for children were the CHRONICLES OF ANCIENT DARKNESS, which began with WOLF BROTHER. Can you tell us a bit about these?
WOLF BROTHER begins with the 12-year-old hero, Torak, on the run after his father is killed by an enormous bear. As this is the Stone Age, Torak is on his own – until he makes friends with a girl called Renn from the Raven Clan, and an orphaned wolf cub. There are six books in the CHRONICLES OF ANCIENT DARKNESS, which take Torak, Renn and Wolf across the Sea, to the Far North, and into the mysterious Deep Forest. Although there’s magic in the books, I’ve never regarded them as fantasy, because it’s the natural magic of hunter-gatherer beliefs.
I wrote the series because they were the kind of books I would have loved as a child. I adored animals, and when I was ten, I pestered my parents for a wolf; of course they said no, and gave me a spaniel instead. Boys seem particularly drawn to the bits in the stories about survival – how you skin a deer, or survive a blizzard – while both girls and boys like the fact that the books are action-packed, and they all seem to love Wolf, especially as parts of each story are told from his point of view.
What is the appeal of writing for children for you?
For me, the story always comes first, and I only think about who will read it later. So I never deliberately set out to write for children, I just had an idea for a story about a boy and a wolf, and I REALLY wanted to write it. It was probably long-delayed wish-fulfilment, because as I said, I’d wanted a wolf of my own.
But now that I am writing for children, I think the appeal is that they’re such fierce critics. They don’t read because your story’s had great reviews, or because they’ll look good carrying it on the tube. They read to find out what happens next. This means you’ve got to grab them from the first line, and keep them hooked. I love that challenge. And it’s a terrific feeling when a parent tells me that it was one of my books which turned their reluctant son or daughter on to reading.
The final book in the CHRONICLES OF ANCIENT DARKNESS won the 2012 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. How did you feel when you found out?
I was astonished. When WOLF BROTHER was first published, someone very knowledgeable about children’s books told me that children’s series didn’t win prizes, so I thought, OK, then I’ll forget about prizes. Frankly, I cared much more that lots of children should actually read and enjoy my books, than that they should win prizes. So to receive such a distinguished accolade as the Guardian Prize was an unlooked-for bonus. It was great, too, that it went to GHOST HUNTER, the last in the series, because this meant I’d kept up the standard right to the end.
Whom did you most like to read as a child?
I loved Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, and Willard Price’s Adventure books, about two boys who travel the world catching animals for zoos. They were so exciting and well-researched and, at the time, I had no idea they were meant for boys; I just vastly preferred them to story books about ballet and school, which were the accepted fodder for girls in the 60s. I also loved Roger Lancelyn Green’s re-telling of the myths of the Norsemen, the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Egyptians. They were so rich and strange, and I liked the fact that the goddesses were every bit as powerful as the gods.
What’s next for you?
I’m deep into THE EYE OF THE FALCON, the third book in GODS AND WARRIORS – which takes Hylas and Pirra to Crete, in the wake of that volcanic eruption. After that, there’ll be two more books for GODS AND WARRIORS, which I’ve already got planned in my head. Beyond that, who knows? I’d love to write another ghost story for adults, as I had huge fun writing my Arctic ghost story, DARK MATTER. And of course, maybe something else for children…
Gods and Warriors: The Burning Shadow is out now on hardback from Puffin. Follow on Twitter @Puffinbooks.