New Work
Fiction For 9-11
Solomon's Tale
A wise cat reincarnates to help a family go through a crisis of homelessness and divorce.
The story has strong emotion, plenty of action and humour, and a spiritual aspect.
A cross-over book, appealing to both children and adults, SOLOMON'S TALE is my best book yet. Written from the heart, it is a readable story with strong emotion, humour, gritty relationship stuff, and, for the first time, I have woven an irresistible golden thread of spirituality into a fiction book. Reincarnation, angels, and how the soul survives death. Big issues, yes, but this story is simply told, by a beautiful cat who can see angels and who has chosen to reincarnate to help a family go through the traumas of separation and poverty.
SOLOMON'S TALE is to be published by AVON (Harper Collins) in Autumn 2013
Face of the Deep
I am passionate about this book because I believe it is unique. Children will love this story because it is full of fascinating prehistoric creatures, dinosaurs, giant dragon flies, trilobites, and the first tiny horses. Its a time-slip story with a difference, a journey through the evolution of life on earth from the primordial seas to the first primitive people. The two children, Liam and Holly, struggle to survive, making fire and cooking unfamiliar food, and staying alive through the age of volcanoes and the ice age.
I researched time-slip stories on the internet and found no other story like this one.
FACE OF THE DEEP has taken three years to write, including the research into prehistoric life. It has gone through five drafts and one professional critique.
Download and read an extract from Face of the Deep [here ...]
to top...Forest of Dreams
A true story of how a couple in their sixties planted their forest of dreams on a fifty acre site in Cornwall. On a shoe-string budget they began their venture with two spades, a wheelbarrow and a collection of trees which they had grown from seed gathered from parks and woods. Over ten years they nurtured and maintained the precious plantation, coping with a variety of environmental and climatic situations and unforeseen difficulties, and created a new young forest now visible on Google Earth.
Illustrated with colour photographs documenting the wood's progress from the first germinating acorns and pine seeds, FOREST OF DREAMS is packed with inspiration of interest to gardeners, tree lovers and conservationists. The story begins with the author's first experience of picking up a shiny conker from a city park and deciding to plant it, her sense of wonder as she watched it germinate and develop into a tree. Deeply effected by the death of the elm trees in the seventies, she pledged that every year, on her autumn birthday, she would plant a tree seed for each year of her life as a way of expressing gratitude for her country childhood. She planted acorns, beechnuts, walnuts, rowan berries and many others, filling her back yard with young trees in pots.
Through the years of bringing up a family, the collection had to be moved several times and hundreds of specimens were donated to parks and conservation schemes. Eventually the couple achieved their dream of owning a plot of land and began to plan and plant, transforming fifty sterile acres into a wildlife paradise. The difficulties of maintaining the new wood are described with humour, and the author, who is also an artist and poet , shares her observation of detail such as the beauty of opening buds, the wild flowers, butterflies and birds of the wood.
What makes FOREST OF DREAMS unique is the way it is written as a biographical account of the actual experience of planting a wood, the hopes and dreams, the disasters and mistakes, the joy of seeing it grow and the final letting go and trusting that the young forest is strong enough to live forever.
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Children's Picture Books
Taora
A story based on the water cycle about a personified water drop who journeys from the frozen mountain top down to the sea and returns as a raindrop, experiencing joy, fear and despair along the way.
500 words. Story completed.
Illustrated By Caroline Osborne Dowle
“I’m not ready for my journey.” cries Taora. “Let me stay.”
“No.“ Says the sun. “I’m melting you,
and everyone else today.“
Taora’s little voice is lost
as her crystal melts in the sun.
She slips and slides and curls and hides.
The journey has begun.
They plunge into the twilightat the bottom of the sea
under the purple hulls of boats
where light can never be
Taora feels imprisoned,
and filled with black despair
“How much longer must I stay here?
Who will hear my silent prayer?”
New Books for Children
FACE OF THE DEEP (Featured above )
THE RAINBOW MAN – 25000 words – Fantasy Adventure – (completed)
THE GIANT OF NAUTILUS HILL – 20000 words – Fantasy Adventure – ( in progress )
SOLOMON'S KITTEN – 30000 words – Sequel to Solomon's Tale – (in progress)
STARS OF GOLD – 1000 words – Non-fiction multi-cultural retelling of the Creation Story – illustrated by Caroline Osborne Dowle – (completed)
New Books for Adults
GOLD AND SILVER LIGHT – 70000 words- First book of a saga spanning 4 generations – Paranormal Fiction – (completed )PEOPLE WHO SHINE IN THE DARK – Non-fiction autobiographical account of the author's secret spiritual life. (in progress)
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