Hot trod! - by Susan Price
Twenty years ago - yes, it was twenty years ago, though it doesn't The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price: Scholastic seem possible - I went on holiday in Northumberland, walked along Hadrian's Wall and bought MacDonald Fraser's book, The Steel Bonnets , about the riding families, or reivers, of the Scottish Borders. As a result, I wrote The Sterkarm Handshake - which tells how a 21st Century multi-national company, FUP, develops a time-machine, and travels back 500 years, to the early 16th Century, in order to exploit the fossil fuels. They intend to bring the coal, oil and gas back through the time tube to their own time, and sell it at huge profit. They come into conflict with the natives, the Sterkarm family. Windsor, the 21st Century executive, makes the mistake of dismissing them as 'peasants armed with sticks.' The 'sticks' are longbows and eight-foot lances and the Sterkarms - shrewd, quick and bolshy to the bo...