FIREBIRD Day!

How do you save the world when it’s already too late?

Don’t ask Leo Lloyd-Jones. Ask him how to steal a car, or why he got excluded from every school in Salford, but don’t come to him for help. This whole thing must be a daft mistake – and if anyone finds out, he’s done for.

Earth is on a deadly collision course that nothing can prevent. The only real hope is Project Firebird, deep inside a blast-proof bunker that shelters the brightest and bravest young people. Leo has got mixed up with the likes of Rhys Carnarvon, the celebrated teenage polar explorer, and other child prodigies chosen to keep the flame of civilisation.

Among them is the streetwise Paige Harris, a girl Leo likes a lot (but not in that way). Paige is desperate to rescue her little sister from London before the catastrophe strikes. But no-one is crazy enough to try that. Almost no-one.

Leo is about to find out why he’s here.

PROJECT FIREBIRD is the first book in my new YA, SF, ABT  trilogy (ABT stands for About Bloody Time). The whole Firebird trilogy is published simultaneously today, so there won’t be any of that tedious waiting around between volumes, forgetting what just happened. It’s been a while in the writing, but hopefully it’s been worth it.

The end of the world is a well-trodden path in fiction – so much so that the council is now having it paved – but this particular trip got going when I learned about a certain place. It really exists, this place. And it’s been built, with astonishing foresight, for the eventuality that things go so badly wrong here on Earth that we’d be doomed to extinction without it. When I read about it, a spark went off in my head, and I remarked to a friend, ‘Someone should write a science fiction story in which the characters end up having to go there, to save the world.’ And he just looked at me, with a certain look. And I replied, ‘Sod off. I’m not doing it.’

Ah well. I spoke too soon.

Roll up and get your copies on Amazon for now (it will be available in other e-formats such as Kobo at a later date). All proceeds go to the Keep Nick Writing Fund, which you may or may not wish to support.

Nick Green