Caught up in the machinery - Nick Green
The news of 19-year-old Sandra Isherwood’s half-million pound deal for her YA debut Bjorkana will fill many a struggling author with envy. On the surface it looks a neat premise: young baseball hero Aidan falls in love with a tree spirit, in the wood where an unsolved murder took place some years before – but you can also see the buzz around this book as part of a wider trend. Look around, and you may notice that it’s not the only recently hyped book that features ‘tree people’ of some sort. Sleeve detail from Bjorkana . Across the pond you have Evergreen Park by K. J. Granger , featuring characters who are essentially dryads, exiled from their cleared forests and now living incognito in suburban Chicago . And back in the UK, Dan Williams’s debut Oak Heart is the story of a man whose soul was bound to a tree by dodgy 14 th Century witchcraft, and who as a result cannot die (or at least not easily). All three are ...