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Small Places is coming!

I’m absolutely delighted to announce that Small Places, my new urban fantasy novel, is available for pre-order, ahead of its launch on Amazon on August 3rd. Small Places joins Jamie, a boy living in a country village, as he runs an errand for a friend of the family to collect medicine from a witch, Melusine, who lives in a hidden forest in the countryside.

Thirteen years later, strange earthquakes and storms are wracking Britain, Jamie’s parents have separated and his mother is suffering from cancer. He returns home to look after her, but receives a mysterious summons from Melusine. Figuring that if she needs him, she may be willing to help his mother, he meets with the witch, learning that the freak weather is being caused by something affecting the earth spirit, Gaia. Mel needs his help to find the source of the problems – and this means travelling to the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, hunting down clues, whilst simultaneously putting up with the irritable witch and dealing with his mum’s terminal illness.

It’s been an instructional (read: slightly painful) process, but I’m thrilled that it’s finally here. Looking back at the process, I finished the first draft on New Year’s Eve of 2019, and ran through preliminary edits by March … and then the pandemic happened and things *really* slowed down. Beta readers enjoyed it, but I did a relatively major re-write after my chief editor (and long-suffering partner) suggested a tweak that affected the entire book. Nonetheless, it’s a better book because of it, and thanks to the changes, we (most significantly) get to meet Jamie’s mum, which also affected a hundred and one other things throughout the book – including the ending!

As ever, you can see the content and trigger warnings on my site – please do consult them prior to reading, or get in touch if you have further questions.

If you’d like a review copy, please do get in touch – the kindle versions are ready for pre-order, and the paperbacks will be ready soon; I had a proof through today and they just need a little tweak. There’ll be a blog tour running with Storytellers on Tour from the 1st August, and merch, goodies and other bits and pieces are also in the works – so stay tuned!

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Parasites is now available in the Amazon store

Parasites, a YA science fiction exploration novel, is now available on the Amazon store in ebook and paperback format! Full disclosure – I’m still making some tweaks to the paperback format. The words are all there, but I’m not completely happy with how the format looks; Amazon’s self-publishing is a bit of a baptism of fire when it comes to physical printing. But it’s there!

Parasites is my first published novel; a sci-fi exploration set at the end of the universe, when suns are cooling, galaxies are starting to contract and the start of the ‘big crunch’ is looming. The people of a small, late-blooming world, Lyra, have discovered a way to traverse multiple universes through ‘thinnings’, setting up colony worlds where they can and mining resources where they can’t. But despite the best efforts of the Lyrans, despair is mounting as habitable worlds prove to be few and far between.

Alessia, a botanist-medic and Kael, a scientist-engineer, are two such explorers, desperately hunting for the resources that will keep their homeworld up and running. Stumbling across a clue in an abandoned city, they begin a hunt for a solution to Lyra’s problems and an answer to the much more personal question of Alessia’s missing father.