Fiction

I’m currently working on two novels. One is fully drafted, the second is still being drafted. Both titles are working titles. I’m represented by Kerry Glencorse at Susanna Lea Associates for my fiction-writing.

The Forest That Eats Bone

Harriet is one of the first historians to travel back in time. But will she be tempted to use this new technology illegally to reunite with her sister Matilda, who died five years ago?

Harriet Atwater, a 23-year-old doctoral student in history at Cambridge, joins a secret research project in the fourteenth-century fenland after the head of the project goes missing. As they search for him throughout the flooded landscape and encounter the local villagers, Harriet becomes uneasily aware that this alternative medieval timeline is mirroring the sinister imaginary game that she and her sister created as children. As Harriet starts to wonder if there is a connection between this world and her own past, she becomes increasingly tempted to abandon the project and try to save her sister – especially as she has always blamed herself for Matilda’s death.

The image is of Denny Abbey, in Cambridgeshire. Credit: me.

I worked on this novel during a three-month Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course, which I completed in March 2016. I was one of the six writers selected for a Fiction Feedback event with Ella Diamond Kahn via Spread the Word in June 2016, I was selected for Penguin Random House’s Write Now Live event in February 2017, and shortlisted for Retreat West’s First Chapter Competition in July 2017. I was mentored by Sam Eades at Orion through the WoMentoring Project from 2017 to 2018.

Old Ice

A loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in twenty-first century Antarctica.

Kit and her father, Gerard, haven’t spoken since she came out as a lesbian last year. Now, he’s taken a job on the largest British Antarctic base, Rothera. Kit privately mocks what she sees as a ‘midlife crisis of masculinity’ – ‘he always wanted to be a shipbuilder like my grandad Peter’. Then Gerard becomes ill and she has to travel to Rothera to see him. As Kit strikes out into the wilderness herself, a series of eerie happenings make her start to wonder if her father has stumbled upon something supernatural. Will Kit work out what’s happening in the farthest south – and its connection to her own family history?

The image shows Rothera in winter. Credit: British Antarctic Survey.

I completed some initial research for this novel at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge in April 2018. A initial outline of the novel was selected as a finalist for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Gulliver Travel Grant in 2019.