Nosy Crow's Blog, page 92

“Some people say that everything began with a Big Bang…” – a guest post by Christopher Edge

Today’s blog post is by author Christopher Edge, on his upcoming novel, The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day.

“Some people say that everything began with a Big Bang…”

So begins my new novel, The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, which will be published by Nosy Crow on the 5th April 2018. As the dark nights draw in, April seems like an age away, but the brilliant team at Nosy Crow have already created beautiful bound proofs of the book which are now making their way into the hands of some early readers.

In her essay Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?, Ursula Le Guin – author of A Wizard of Earthsea, one of the urtexts of my childhood reading – wrote:

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it alive: a live thing, a story.” 

It’s thrilling – and a little bit scary too – to realize that The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day is now coming alive and becoming a story, so it’s been incredibly heartening to hear some early responses to the book:

@edgechristopher's #InfiniteLivesofMaisieDay is Out of this World, on-the-edge-of-your-seat Amazing! Last 2 chapters, I couldn't breathe! pic.twitter.com/CULdKDdrVr

— Lauren St John (@laurenstjohn) October 31, 2017

Wow! That is all. Wow! #MaisieDay ✨ @edgechristopher @NosyCrowBooks #kidlit pic.twitter.com/LBpAwyDUq7

— LibraryGirl&BookBoy (@BookSuperhero2) October 30, 2017

@edgechristopher has created an incredibly smart & extraordinary story that blew my mind. #MaisieDay an unforgettable heart-breaking tale pic.twitter.com/eLs4VsqmKI

— Jo Clarke (@bookloverJo) October 27, 2017

An intriguing plot, an emotional punch, and a better understanding of the Universe, #MaisieDay delivers them all. @edgechristopher @nosycrow pic.twitter.com/LXrWP20jer

— Barry Hutchison (@barryhutchison) October 31, 2017

Last night I finished #MaisieDay by @edgechristopher, I just need to say how much I LOVE it! My review will go up nearer to publication!

— Nicola (@PrythianBworm) October 24, 2017

Enjoyed my journey today because I had this wonderful book to read. Brilliant and thought-provoking. Loved it @edgechristopher pic.twitter.com/q46j46BElw

— Jane Etheridge (@janesetheridge) October 28, 2017

I’ll be revealing more details about The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day in the run-up to publication, but I’ll leave you now with a few more of the opening lines of the story.

Thank you, Chris! If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our book news, and be the first to read an exclusive extract from The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, sign up to our books newsletter at this page, or with the form below.

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Light on a Winter’s Night

Today’s blog post is by illustrator Axel Scheffler.

There are still tickets left for an event that is very important to me that will happen in Richmond very soon (on Saturday 4 November), in aid of two different charities supporting Syrian refugees in Greece and in Jordan: Light on a Winter’s Night.

The evening will start with a cocktail reception, during which you will have the chance to view details of the exciting items offered in our “silent auction” and make preliminary bids.

The sit-down dinner will be provided by Christine and Ahmad from Aleppo who own a deli in Teddington. Small, cold starter dishes will be followed by hot dishes and a sweet baklava treat to finish.

During the course of the evening, I will draw the Gruffalo and other characters – or whatever the audience suggests, really, except cows: I don’t like to draw cows. Actually, I would even draw a cow. And you will have the chance to bid for the drawings at auction. My friend, the author Elizabeth Laird, will also auction the dedication to her forthcoming novel, ‘Song of the Dolphin Boy’ to be published by Macmillan Children’s Books in March 2018. There will be many other prizes on offer too – we’re running  a raffle as well as the silent auction. Prizes include a week’s accommodation in a flat in the centre of Edinburgh during next year’s festival, a copy of Warhorse signed by Michael Morpurgo, a school visit from me, and a magnificent walnut wood backgammon board inlaid with mother-of-pearl, brought out from Damascus as the war began.

Tickets cost £50 per person. The money we raise will be split between two charities, both of which are working for refugees fleeing conflict and destitution. Like Three Peas, Helping Refugees in Jordan is run entirely by volunteers and has no administrative costs. The charity is without any political or religious affiliation.

Please come. It would be great to see you there.

You can book your place here.

The House that Inspired Evie’s Ghost

Today’s blog post is by author Helen Peters, on the house that inspired the setting for Evie’s Ghost, her latest novel for 9-12 year olds.

Last week, thirteen years after my first visit, I went to Chastleton House, a Jacobean mansion in Oxfordshire. I have a particular affection for this house, as my novel Evie’s Ghost is set in a fictionalised version of Chastleton. The house in Evie’s Ghost is called Charlbury, a name with suitably ghostly word associations. When I revisited the area last week, I was surprised to see a real village near Chastleton called Charlbury. Perhaps this was coincidence, or maybe I had seen it before and it was lodged somewhere in my subconscious mind.

The first few drafts of Evie’s Ghost were not actually set in Chastleton House at all, but in a fictionalised version of Osterley Park, a palatial eighteenth century  mansion now also owned by the National Trust. It was a visit to Osterley Park that gave me the idea for the story, when I discovered that the only daughter of the family had eloped, aged seventeen, with a man of whom her parents violently disapproved. So when I started to wonder what would happen if a modern girl travelled back in time and became embroiled in those elopement plans, I envisaged the story happening at Osterley Park.

However, the book went through several major rewrites. At some point in the process, I decided that the house needed to be older, spookier and more forbidding than the gilded palace that is Osterley Park. It was then that I remembered Chastleton.

Thirteen years ago, I spent October half term in a National Trust holiday apartment above the stable yard at Chastleton House. The house is approached through wrought iron gates off a single-track lane. There are no other houses in sight: nothing but fields and farmland on all sides. This was ideal for the new version of Evie’s Ghost. Evie’s journey to the house is a gradual stripping-away of everything that’s comfortable and familiar to her. She’s a London girl, used to constant traffic noise, local shops, street lights and twenty-four hour public transport. So when she has to get a taxi from a deserted railway station to her godmother’s house, the journey along unlit roads with no sign of human habitation completely freaks her out. And when she finally arrives at her destination, her relief at not being murdered by the silent cab driver soon changes to further disorientation when she sees the huge stone mansion that seems to rise straight out of the lawns that surround it, its leaded windows glittering darkly in the rain. When she then drops her phone in a puddle, her severance from everything she has ever known is complete.

It’s no accident, of course, that Evie arrives at the house on a windy, rainy night. I stayed in the stable-block apartment in misty wet weather, when the low grey skies made it feel like permanent dusk, and I have vivid memories of rain-soaked grass, huge holly hedges, water dripping from tall trees, and misshapen topiary like collapsing blancmanges encircled by an ancient yew hedge. It felt like the ideal setting for a ghost story.

The inside of Chastleton House is also incredibly atmospheric, partly due to the fact that the family who lived there for some four hundred years had very little spare cash, so it was never modernised. It was easy to imagine that a nineteenth-century head of the family, strapped for cash with a crumbling mansion to maintain, might be tempted to force his only daughter to marry his wealthy friend, however unsuitable the match might be.

When I dug out my National Trust guidebook to Chastleton, I was thrilled to discover that it included detailed floor plans of the entire house. These were incredibly useful in visualising the characters’ movements, particularly as Evie has to work as a housemaid, which meant I needed to know her work routine and where she was most likely to come into contact with members of the family. I could also sketch out my ideas for how the house would have been converted into flats on top of these floorplans. If I hadn’t had them, I would have had to make up my own, so I am very grateful to the National Trust for doing that job for me!

Helen’s annotated floorplans of Chastleton House

Of course, there were elements of Chastleton that I changed to suit the purposes of the story. With the gardens and grounds of Charlbury, I gave free rein to my English country garden fantasies. The gardens of Chastleton, which were much neglected before the National Trust took it on, are far less ornate now than they would have been. But when Evie goes back in time to 1814 Charlbury, she finds an orchard in bloom, a walled kitchen garden, beautiful lawns, perfectly trimmed hedges, herb borders, flower beds, a bluebell wood and a farmyard. The gardens provide some respite to Evie in the short breaks between her otherwise relentless duties, and also allow her to pass messages to the gardener’s boy with whom the daughter of the house is planning to elope.

The most distinctive feature of the fictional Charlbury was inspired by the history of another ancient house, Hellens Manor in Herefordshire. On her first night at Charlbury, Evie sees writing scratched on the glass of her bedroom window. The message reads:

Sophia Fane

Imprisoned here

27th April 1814

This message is the catalyst that takes Evie into the past to try to help Sophia escape her terrible fate. Although the idea of a message scratched into a window pane by a desperate imprisoned woman was taken from a different house, it seemed perfectly feasible, given its long and dramatic history, that such a thing could have taken place at Chastleton. And one of the joys of historical fiction is, of course, being able to take inspiration from many different sources.

I was absolutely thrilled when Nosy Crow asked Daniela Terrazzini to illustrate the cover of Evie’s Ghost, having loved her work on other covers, particularly L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy. My editor asked me to send through some ideas for how the house should look. Daniela used these photographs of Chastleton to create a truly beautiful cover.

Thank you, Helen! If you’ve not yet discovered Evie’s Ghost, you can read the book’s opening chapters below:

Buy the book online.

And here’s Helen reading from the book:

Buy the book online.

Barry Hutchison shares his favourite halloween story

This September we published Spectre Collectors: Too Ghoul for School, the first book in a hilarious new series by Barry Hutchison, with echoes of Ghostbusters, Men In Black and Monsters Inc. And earlier this week we had the chance to film Barry give a reading from the book, talk about the inspiration behind the series, and share his favourite (UTTERLY HILARIOUS) Halloween story – find out more below!

Here’s Barry introducing the new series:

Here’s the (very funny, very silly) inspiration behind Spectre Collectors:

Here’s Barry reading the book’s FANTASTIC opening:

And here’s Barry’s best Halloween story (which had me in TEARS of laughter just off-camera):

If you’re new to Spectre Collectors, you can read the opening chapter of Too Ghoul for School below. Funny, exciting, and action-packed, this series is PERFECT for 9+ year olds.

Denzel is having no luck with his maths homework. First, it’s too difficult, then there’s the terrifying phantom that wants to kill him, then two teenagers explode through his window holding guns and throwing magic. They are the Spectre Collectors, and spooky is their specialty.

Realising that Denzel has a special gift, they sweep him off to their headquarters, where Denzel quickly realises that he is terrible at the job. But there’s a serious problem on its way from the Spectral Realm, and Denzel is going to use all of his non-existent skills to save the day…

Here’s a look inside the book:

Buy the book online.

Next week we’ll be offering some exclusive signed copies of the book to win – keep an eye on the blog for more details!

Nosy Crow on Instagram

If you’re following Nosy Crow on Instagram, you might have noticed that we’ve recently become a bit more active!

We’re re-launching our Instagram channel – with first looks at some of our covers, sneak peeks inside our beautiful books, a chance to see what’s coming out from Nosy Crow in the months ahead, and more. And, obviously, there’s plenty of important Nosy Crow Dog content.

We’ll be running some great competitions and giveaways on Instagram over the next few weeks – if you don’t want to miss out, you can find us here – we hope to see you there!

Listen to Christopher Edge on Down the Rabbit Hole

The latest episode of Down the Rabbit Hole aired yesterday, with special guests Christopher Edge, author of The Many Worlds of Albie Bright and The Jamie Drake Equation – and if you didn’t manage to catch it live, you can listen to the episode on catch-up now!

You can listen to Chris’s episode of Down the Rabbit Hole below, or at this page – this month’s featured books for discussion are I Want to Be in a Scary Story by Sean Taylor and Jean Jullien, Grave Matter by Juno Dawson and Alex T. Smith, and Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend.

Here’s a look inside Chris’s latest book, The Jamie Drake Equation:

We have a very limited number of signed copies of the book available for sale – you can buy them online here.

Don’t Wake Up Tiger (the crochet edition)

We received an email from Britta Teckentrup, author-illustrator of Don’t Wake Up Tiger, with some INCREDIBLE photographs. In her email, Britta said:

“I have just received some photographs from a Dutch lady who has knitted all of my characters from Don’t Wake Up Tiger. and wanted to share them with you as they are absolutely lovely, I think. Her name is Evelien Poelarends – she works at her son’s school library once a week and knitted the characters just for fun.”

Don’t Wake Up Tiger has been an incredible success in the Netherlands – the book (translated as Ssst! De tijger slaapt, and published by Gottmer Uitgevers) has won the prestigious Picture Book of the Year award from the Dutch organisation CPNB.

And these crochet characters from the book are absolutely EXTRAORDINARY! Here’s a look at them all:

And you can take a look inside Don’t Wake Up Tiger (and see what EXCELLENT likeness Evelien’s crochet versions are!) below:

Buy the book.

Thank you, Britta – and thank you, Evelien!

A special edition of the Nosy Crow Reading Group for The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

Were delighted to announce a special edition of the Nosy Crow Reading Group – and our last reading group of 2017 – for the first volume of Philip Pullman’s highly-anticipated new series, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage!

We’ll be meeting on Monday, November 20th at 6.30pm, at the Nosy Crow offices – 14 Baden Place, Crosby Row, SE1 1YW – for a discussion of the book.

If you’d like to come along, just register for a place with the form below, or at this page.

You can buy the book online from Waterstones here.

We hope you can join us!

Two Nosy Crow titles shortlisted for the 2018 Haringey Children’s Book Award

The shortlist for the 2018 Haringey Children’s Book Award has been announced, and we’re delighted to see two Nosy Crow books have been recognised!

Th award, now in it’s 4th year, was established in order to promote literacy and literature in Haringey. Organised by the librarian community, the prize aims to inspire and encourage reading and writing amongst the borough’s children and young people. And we’re thrilled that both Sweet Pizza, by G.R. Gemin, and The Jamie Drake Equation, by Christopher Edge, are in the running for the award!

A great story that has immigration at its core, Sweet Pizza is perfect for fans of Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Morpurgo – it’s got fantastic dramatic writing, strong characters, and big-hearted social realism.

Joe’s family run the local cafe in Bryn Mawr. It’s seen better days and Joe’s mam wants to sell it. But it was started before the war by Joe’s Italian great-grandfather, and he can’t bear to see it shut. And Joe loves his Italian heritage: the language, the opera, the lasagne! As Joe looks down the depressing High Street, he’s determined to bring this diverse town together through good food and fine times! He vows to save the family business, and find out more about his past at the same time….

Here’s a look inside the book:

Buy the book.

A phenomenal novel for 9+ year olds, The Jamie Drake Equation combines great storytelling, popular science, and lots of heart. The book has been named one of The Times’ Children’s Books of the Year – Alex O’Connell writes: “If you like stories about space, aliens and having to share your parents with other people, this is for you. It is told with the intelligence and heart we can expect of Christopher Edge, nominated for the Carnegie Medal for The Many Worlds of Albie Bright ... A fun, intellectually challenging novel with an emotional centre.”:

Combining action and adventure with cutting-edge space exploration and a compelling emotional core, this is truly awesome storytelling. Here’s a look inside the book:

Buy the book.

Congratulations, Chris and Giancarlo!

Christopher Edge answers questions on The Jamie Drake Equation

Next week, Christopher Edge – author of The Many Worlds of Albie Bright and The Jamie Drake Equation – will be a guest on Down the Rabbit Hole. And Chris stopped by the Nosy Crow office this week to answer some questions about his latest book! You can watch Chris give a reading from The Jamie Drake Equation,  explain the science behind the book, share his favourite space-related fact, and more, in the videos below:

What was the inspiration for The Jamie Drake Equation?

The science behind the book:

Do you think there’s life on other planets?

What’s your favourite fact about space?

Watch Chris give a reading from the book:

And if you’ve not yet discovered The Jamie Drake Equation, you can read the book’s opening chapters below:

Buy the book online.