Pre-order Utterly Dark and/or Kevin

Authors and booksellers LOVE pre-orders. They can help booksellers to notice a new book in a very crowded market, and give them an idea of how many they’ll need to stock. So, with three weeks to go until the UK launch of my new novel, it’s time I tried to persuade you to order a copy, ideally from your local independent bookshop, who I’m sure will be glad to hear from by phone, email, or in person. Id be very grateful!

If, on the other hand, you don’t have a local independent bookshop, here’s a handy link to order online.

Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep is a fantasy story set on the imaginary island of Wildsea, somewhere off the coast of England, round about the year 1810. One of its (joke) working titles was Magic Poldark, which gives you the general idea, but many other influences have seeped into it too; there’s a lot of made-up folklore, some seaweed monsters that feel as if they’ve shambled off the wobbly set of a 1970s Doctor Who story, and a general air of impending doom which is hopefully lightened a bit by the irrepressible heroine, Utterly Dark herself. It was written as a stand-alone, but I miss Wildsea and Utterly and friends so much that I’m at work on a sequel at the moment. The cover art is by Paddy Donnelly, and here’s a sneak peek at some of the lovely chapter headings he’s created for the book.

But WAIT, I hear you cry, I don’t like the sound of this at all! Supernatural shenanigans on made-up Regency islands are not my cup of Lapsang Souchong, and those seaweed monsters will give me nightmares. A nice try, but you don’t get out of me asking you to pre-order things that easily. For it is also three weeks until the UK publication of Kevin vs the Unicorns, the fourth and (we think) funniest of the Roly Poly Flying Pony books I’ve been writing for the past few years with Sarah McIntyre, the glamorous American Eric Morecambe to my grumpy Devonian Ernie Wise. You can preorder that from your favourite bookshops too! And I’ll be just as grateful! And so will Sarah! So that’s twice as much authorly gratitude coming your way!

And if you’re really keen you can order it from comic shop Page 45, for whom Sarah has designed these exclusive bookplates for the first 100 orders.

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury, after a painti

Railhead A-Z

In order to save my website it became necessary to destroy it. Before I pulled the plug I rescued the longest post on my old blog. Here it is, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck: my A-Z guide to the ideas behind my novel Railhead. At the time it was written, Railhead had just been published. I'll be putting up some posts about the sequels, Black Light Express and Station Zero , in the coming days. Railhead cover art by Ian McQue A is for Alternative Forms of Transport ‘What I need,’ I thought, when I’d been struggling on and off for a few years with my space epic (working title, ‘Space Epic’) ‘is an alternative to spaceships…’ I’ve always enjoyed space stories. I first started reading science fiction back in 1977, when the original Star Wars film made me realise that outer space could be just as good a backdrop for fantasy as Tolkien-esque worlds of myth and legend. (Actually, I didn’t see Star Wars until 1978, but its bow-wave of publicity hit these shores the p

Station Zero

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