“A charming story about a shy young giant who is lonely because everyone runs away from her as she seems so frightening.” Lovereading

“Lucy Coats weaves a novel using scraps of ancient myths and legends from the Norse and Celtic cultures and mixes them with up-to-date teenage issues, such as bullying, to highlight the plight of many teenagers today and show them just how they can survive the turmoil that bullying brings.

The result is a story that is a fantasy for non-fantasy lovers; of overcoming teenage issues; and a damn fun rollick of a read!

“a charming, imaginative story ... a good read, with lively dialogue” Irish Examiner

Above the clouds: Fairy decision time
'Right, who's next on the list?
'I thought we could try this one.'
'For 3WD? You're sure? She hasn't worked directly with humans before.'
'We've all got to start somewhere.'
'Granted, but she does have particularly strong feelings about them. You know how she took the incident that happened last year to her friend.'
'That was a high-risk assignment. He was a bumblebee, for clouds' sake!'
'But still...'
'It'll be fine. We'll give her a flower life cycle. Nice gentle way for her to make contact. All she'll need to do is position herself perfectly and she'll be picked with love and care and admiration. No danger of being swatted!'
'You're sure she's ready for this?'
'It's time she started on the extra tasks. She needs to start deepening her compassion. She'll have to if she's ever going to move on.'
'We'll monitor the assignment closely?'
'Ray will cover it. He's supervised her before.'
'Well...OK. It looks like you've got everything covered. Let's do it.'
'Good. I'll tell 3WD we're ready to go.'

“I do so like Tizzie, she is used to making the best of things before being bundled off to somewhere new. I never really know what inspires my characters, but it is important to have the right name. Tizzie just jumped into my mind and was right.”

“There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o’-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o’-shanters like patchwork tea cosies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were moustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which smaller boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles’ pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.”

Genuinely scary yet hilariously funny, Jamie Rix’s original idea for the Grizzly Tales series came from tricks that he used to play on his own two sons. He says:

“The first tale came from one I played on my elder son Ben when he was four and wouldn’t eat his supper. We were driving through France and we passed a shop which had a sign above the window: PASTA. I told Ben that this was the world famous factory of the Spaghetti Man. If he didn’t eat his supper that night I would bring him back to the factory, hand him over to the Spaghetti Man, who would then turn him into Lasagna overnight and we would eat him for lunch tomorrow. Ben ate EVERYTHING put in front of that night and I went away and wrote The Spaghetti Man.”

Jamie adds “I have read these cautionary tales in schools up and down the country. I’ve had a few children cry with fear, one or two leap onto the teacher’s lap but only one girl slowly remove her anorak and put it on back to front so that by the end of the story her hood was completely covering her face...”

“Ideas come in all kinds of different ways, but very often it's a particular place or atmosphere that starts a story for me. My characters are never based on real people – that's actually much harder than making them up – but obviously I use what I know of people and how they behave.”

“While I was researching Outcast, I spent time around Lake Storsjön in northern Sweden. There I was lucky enough to hear elk bellowing as I wandered the springtime forest, and to find a whole clearing and dam system made by beavers. I also got muzzle to muzzle with some elk at an elk refuge, including some adorable five-day-old calves and a mournful yearling who’d just been abandoned by his truly enormous mother.

To get the feel of snakes, I met some at Longleat where I handled a very beautiful cornsnake and tow regal, curious and extremely strong royal pythons. I hadn’t understood just how beautiful and fascinating snakes can be until I held one, and felt the flicker of her tongue on my face as she inspected me.”

“Angel is about a little girl. It starts with a little girl who wakes up in the middle of the night, goes downstairs and comes back up. She lies down and suddenly in her room is this increasing magnification of light. She looks at the bottom of her bed and there, at the foot, is this glorious angel. It's a kind of classic Victorian angel, glowing, bright, beautiful, and it smiles really benevolently, and it starts talking to her and eventually it says, ‘There's something very extraordinary about you,’ and it doesn’t tell her what it is...’

“Eventually she’s at school as a teenager, which is where we find her, and she’s trying to have a normal life, have friends and so on. Suddenly it’s a dark angel that visits her, and it’s the opposite of the original, it’s huge and black, and its shadow follows her everywhere and it’s really malevolent. I suppose, the story’s really about what happens when she finds out what these angels need from her, what they expect from her and how well she’s going to meet those expectations.”

Taken from the transcript of the audio interview with Cliff McNish

“In writing The Rule of Claw I wanted to do two things. First to tell a gripping adventure story that was exciting, involving and emotional. Second, I wanted to explore the Evolution versus Faith debate that is even more relevant now than it was in Darwin’s time over a century and a half ago. My intention was that The Rule of Claw could be read on very different levels by different people.

Ever since I was a boy I have been overawed and fascinated by science, I have also long been interested in the world’s religions, especially in the way religious faith has shaped our own and other societies – faith is so often a political issue. I wanted to bring some of my fascination into my writing.”

“I thought I would be a lawyer until I looked at a few law-school books”

When she is not writing books Francesca Simon is doing theatre and restaurant reviews or chasing after her Tibetan Spaniel, Shanti.

“I decided to write Snakehead on the dock at Naxos Town, while waiting for the meltemi to subside, (the breeze was well above Beaufort 6) so that our ferry to Amorgos could leave. I was thinking about the floods of refugees of our times, and how people must have felt, nearly thirty centuries ago, when the Great Disaster that destroyed Thera ripped their world apart ... Or maybe what set me going was the ruined city of Akrotiri, on Santorini itself. Akrotiri has no palaces, no show-off tombs. It was just a pleasant little city by the sea, with high-rise buildings, beautiful interior décor, running water, flush toilets. No defensive walls, nothing like that. They seem to have lived the way “we” live now: clean, affluent, comfortable lives, in peace and plenty. Then everything changed. Not overnight (the Aegean recovered, to some degree, after the Great Disaster, as the archaeological records show); but relentlessly, until the quality of life enjoyed by the people of what we call the “Minoan” civilisation became unbelievable: a fantastic, legendary time, the time of the myths.

“In Snakehead I’ve re-told one of the Greek Myths as if the adventures were happening today, to real, recognisable people: because I felt as if that distant civilisation was reaching out to me, saying we were like you. More like you than any people since. I chose “Perseus and Andromeda” because I love the Cyclades, and there’s a Cycladean connection; and the more I researched the more I realised I’d chosen the greatest of all the myths. I wrote about Andromeda’s “flying marks”, because it seems to be true that alphabetic writing reached the Aegean just when everything else was falling apart. And because I wanted to say that whenever a civilisation is destroyed, by natural disaster or whatever means, something thrilling and new is being born.”

Are you ready to be a ghost-hunter? Make sure you're armed with these essential pieces of ghost-hunting equipment and see if you can discover what it is that's going bump in the night...
Cotton thread and tape – so you can tell if doors have been opened in the night.
Talcum powder – so you can see ghost footprints.
A thermometer – to record drops in temperature when you feel a sudden ghostly chill.
Windchimes – so you can listen out for approaching ghosts who cause a slight breeze.

To see what else you'll need and for lots of very spooky stories from all over Britain get your copy of Ghosts! by Richard Brassey – The Ultimate Guide for Ghosts Hunters.