Authors Electric

The Audio Version The first choice was only partly mine. Publisher Adlard Coles was planning an audio version of Stars to Steer By . Who would read it? They suggested three professional narrators which I put to the family vote. One, whose voice was rather light (and pleasant, I thought) was rejected by all except for myself and my oldest granddaughter. The other two -- stronger, more assured, more (or less?) flexible -- split the voters entirely: Francis, who listens to a lot of audio books and who spent a generous amount of time researching samples beyond  the clips we had been sent, headed one faction but the Adlard Coles editorial office AND an equal number of family voters, preferred the other. I began to feel both protective and shy. Stars to Steer By is non-fiction, it’s historical, it’s researched but it’s also, occasionally, personal. My thoughts, my history, my words. I discovered that I wanted to speak them, some of them anyway… the opening for instance: ‘One early eve...

  Apologies for contacting you when we have never met or been in touch before. I am trying to trace a Julia Jones who lived in Writtle as a child, and wondered if this might be you? I run a removals and clearance company and have this week been clearing the property of a book publisher called Arne Soova. Within the contents, I came across a portrait sketch by Brenda Moore and on the back of the frame is written “Julia Jones as a child…[something beginning with N] Hall, Writtle, Essex”. Apologies if this is not you but if it is, I am just really interested in the story behind the portrait and would love to know more. I can also send a picture of the portrait if you wished. This unexpected email came from Alexa MacDonald and her husband Johnney, whose removals and clearance company is in Newmarket, Suffolk.   When a house is almost empty, Alexa explained that they often find some remaining letters, photos, small items which seem likely to have a personal significance to someo...

When U-711x returned to Harstad on Feb 24 1945 she carried an unexpected load in her starboard torpedo tube. It was the body of an Englishman but this man wasn’t dead as they’d expected when they’d picked him from the freezing Barents Sea, he was, miraculously, alive. They should never have taken him on board. They’d surfaced, briefly, as the wind had begun whipping the sea into a foam-flecked gale. They had wanted to see the wreckage of their victim. A British corvette. They knew they’d hit her. Everyone in the boat had felt the detonation. They had cheered. It was their first real success. No one liked to think too much about the fishing vessel they’d stopped late in the previous summer. It had had eight civilians on board – Norwegians, heading for Shetland – though they refused to admit their destination. Five men, a woman and two children. They’d sunk the boat and landed the people in Lodingen. They didn’t need to take them all the way back to Hammerfest. They hadn’t come from...

More than a decade ago in The Salt-Stained Book   (2011)  D onny, the hero, was by the shores of Gitchee Gumee (okay, fact checkers, it was Alton Water, a reservoir near Ipswich in Suffolk) when he felt the tang of the North Wind. It was a life-changing moment, the extent of which he has yet to experience fully. That’s a thought-in-progress. More recently I’ve been reading Paul Heiney’s Goodbye Mr Puffin which includes a wonderful page of praise for that same ‘tang’. ‘ I love anything with the word ‘north’ in it. I adore the air that blows in northern parts for its freshness and its tang. I can sup on it as if it were a glass of the finest claret. The true north wind is the tastiest of all and best when it is close to frigid.’ Heiney writes of the ‘spirituality to be found by heading in the direction of north.’   Is this something that Donny will experience? I’m not sure. In 2018, at the end of Pebble , I left him on a Russian superyacht (she was originally an Arctic s...

Festive flags at Boomtowm  I’ll never feel quite the same about festivals. Over the last few years I’ve written several posts in response to my happy experiences at the Felixstowe Book Festival . But I've usually been looking from a performer's point of view -- never exactly undervaluing the efforts of organiser Meg Reid and her volunteers, but not setting them centre stage.  Earlier this year, observing my daughter Georgie Thorogood turning her vision of Dixie Fields (her debut country music festival) into reality, I began to get a glimpse of the extraordinary level of challenge faced by all festival organisers. (And here's to you too, Ros Green, at the Essex Book Festival. ) In May I wrote a blogpost apologising to my fictional character, Lottie Livesey, for giving her a festival organiser's role to ensure she was sufficiently off-stage in Pebble to allow my child characters an unimpeded adventure. Poor Lottie, when I'd side-lined her previously (in  A...

Peter Duck approaching Bawdsey early 1960s I was trying to reach the Bawdsey Radar Museum. A long planned visit – part of my background research for  Pebble  (volume six in the ‘Strong Winds’ series). I was impatient to arrive. Too impatient? I took a wrong turning. A gate was open that should have been closed. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was inside some chain-link fencing and driving up a poorly maintained road. The brick-built bungalow to my left showed broken windows and missing slates. There were brambles. Unexplained structures in different stages of decay and dereliction. The grass was ragged. There were no signs. I knew this wasn’t where I was meant to be. However modest the newly re-opened museum they would surely have put up a notice for visitors. I should stop and turn back. perimeter fence I went on.  Driving uphill towards the empty sky. As I neared the farthest edge of this wide space, I stopped my car beside a patch of concrete. If I wer...