Authors Electric

  If that's the view from the front door, I'm staying in. That Storm Goretti was some storm.    And that's the view from the back door. It weighed down and broke my rose arch.            Still....   The Ghost Drum My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.         In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky! In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long, the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.      In winters there, the cold is so fierce the frost can be heard crackling and snapping as it travels through the air. The snow is so deep that...

 In January 2024, I'm quite chuffed to say, my book The Ghost Drum was reviewed in The Times by Lucy Bannerman, as 'Children's Book of the Week.' Ghost Drum by Susan Price review — a rediscovered gem of a fairytale Narrated by a cat on a golden chain, this Carnegie winning story of a young shaman fighting back against a brutal ‘Czardom’ is breathtaking Lucy Bannerman Saturday January 27 2024, 12.01am, The Times My word. Ghost Drum isn’t just a gem; it’s the Fabergé egg of fairytales. Having fallen out of print, this electrifying story is now being reissued as part of Faber’s Young Adult Classics series and what a treat it is. We begin on a midwinter night “in a far-away Czardom” when a stranger knocks on the door and persuades a slave woman to hand over her newborn baby. “The snow is so deep that the houses are half-buried in it, and the frost so hard that it grips the houses and squeezes them till they crack.” The stranger is a (good) witch who raises th...