Sir Pent is back, and is more powerful and dangerous than ever before. He has become a minister in the government and has weaseled his way into the world of sport. He is determined that his own private team of athletes win the Junior Olympics, and he’ll stop at nothing, not even kidnap, to get his runner up on the podium.

And who is there to stop him?

Step forward the master of trickery, disguise and ingenious invention: the Pimpernel. And his unlikely helpers: the Geek and the Greek.

Let it RIP!

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What do I think of exams?

Everyone with their heads down and scribbling. The air thick with
anxiety . . .

SATS! RATS! BATS!

No, I don’t like exams at all. And while I think about it I don’t much like bullies or stupid rules, or boring lessons – and if you put all three together you get my nightmare school.It’s called Staleways and it’s in a place called Peasely. The school’s a dark and gloomy building with huge black gates, so wherever you are in the town you can always see it. That’s not the worst thing about it though; the creepy, villainous headmaster, Sir Pent, uses all the bullies and thugs to run the place, and what’s more, Sir Pent loves to send all the good, clever pupils to the swotshop, where they take test, after test, after test . . . and nobody is sure why. It just seems to be the way it is.

What’s needed is a hero. A mysterious hero. A hero who doesn’t look a like a hero. But a hero who just knows exactly how to make Sir Pent and his bullies look totally stupid.

What’s needed is The Pimpernel.

And the Pimpernel needs a gang. One of them is Trokka, the Greek, and the other is Minou, the Geek.

What we don’t know is: who on earth is the Pimpernel?

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This is the sequel to Abe’s Team. On their return from Egypt, Abe and Alicia have to search out their anarchic team of ancient footballing chums. But in the time that they have been away, Britain has completely changed and is now ruled by a dark sisterhood of witches. Time seems to have gone backwards, cities have crumbled, motorways have become cracked with weeds. And Alicia and Abe realise – or at least Alicia realises – that the only way you can fight magic is with magic. The trouble is, magic corrupts. Alicia discovers she has the power, but this power begins to change
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I was sent off to boarding school when I was seven. My main memory is of always being made to stand out in the corridor. I didn’t mind this too much because there were loads of photographs along the corridor of boys who had been at the school before me. Still, it could get quite spooky standing down there on your own when everyone else was up in their dormitory and the corridor seemed so long and shadowy.I remember clearly that one of the early photographs went right back about sixty years and the boys had to wear really wierd clothes. I wondered what sort of people they had turned into. And then I wondered what would happen if the picture of the team I was looking at suddenly stepped out of the photograph – not as the young boys they were in the image, but as old men. Well, old men on the outside anyway.

This is what happens to the main character in this story. He is called Ebrahim, nicknamed Abe. He is half Egyptian, and his mother is a witch. He doesn’t know that of course. There is quite a lot he doesn’t know. How to look after a football team of geriatrics who think they are eleven is almost the least of his troubles. Alicia, daughter of a decidedly witchy headmistress could be a more serious problem . . .

I had a lot of fun writing this and its sequel, Jamboy.

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Willie Cormack is a young lad, a gifted fiddler player and with an eye for the girls too maybe. He lives in a wild enough place right out at the end of a place called the Mullet – a peninsula, so on three sides of him there is the cold deep Atlantic. And what is it that he fears more than anything else?The ocean.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, but when his new friend – a sailor all the way from Morroco – is accused of assaulting a girl in the village, Willie finds he has to deal with his fears in a way that he had never imagined.

When I was living in Mayo, in Ireland, two stories haunted me. True stories, that is. One was an account of a terrible sea storm where all the young men, except for two brothers, who lived on a pair of islands off this coast were drowned when they were out fishing for salmon. The second was about something that had just happened before I moved into the area: a young sailor, an African – no one seemed sure which part of Africa he came from – was stranded out on the Mullet when his yacht ran aground during a heavy storm. Somehow those stories threaded together and Willie Cormack stepped out to meet me.

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I really like Kate. This is her story and she’s very honest – though, as she tells us pretty early on, she, well, makes things up, ‘not lies exactly but they just slip out . . . I suppose they are lies.’ That’s her. She has a fluffy glove puppet called Rabbit that she talks to quite a bit; ever since her younger brother got killed in a road accident.But it wasn’t her fault.

I know it wasn’t but she’s not so sure, which is maybe why she and her mum don’t get on so well.

They have moved into a new house that backs onto a deep wood. And woods are always dangerous, and shadowed with secrets and old stories, one of which has strange echoes with Kate’s own life.

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This story was set in a near future which in some ways we have already passed by. England is becoming a police state. London is crumbling and there is violence in the air. Demonstrations are attacked by thugs and nobody seems to trust anyone…The main character is teenager called Jeremiah Talent and his dad is the US ambassador in London. When Talent arrives for his summer vacation he finds himself a target and the friends he makes are not quite what they seem to be.

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Wild men lurching out of the mist, a house burning down, a body hauled out of the river tangled in a poacher’s net . . . the village that Sean Moon and his family move to is a disturbingly unfriendly place. It seems that the one thing the villagers agree on is that they dislike the Moon family . . . ‘Bad faith to them.’I wrote this novel when I was living right out on the very edge of the west coast of Ireland with nothing but the Atlantic and a thousand miles of stormy sky between me and America.

The idea for the story grew out of one particular place where I would often go fishing, a long bend on the river with a deep pool where, if you were lucky, you might meet a salmon. It’s called the Graveyard because on the far bank is an old ruined church perched on a low mound with old,old Celtic crosses tilting this way and that out of the long grass. Because I spent hours not catching fish there I spent a lot of time day dreaming, and one of those day dreams turned into a body, all tangled up in a poacher’s net, being hauled up out of the pool. A murder. That’s where the story started for me, about terrible things being brought up to the surface.

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