Posts by Peter
The Writer’s Life
What made Michelle start writing? What other jobs has she done? Why can’t she whistle? You can find answers to these and many more things you never knew about Michelle in this, the most comprehensive collection of interview questions and answers about her ever assembled! So – what made you start writing? I wrote my…
Read MoreQueen Of The Stone Age
Michelle is interviewed by Stephen Moss for The G2 section of The Guardian. Michelle Paver is sparkier and less diffident than I recall. We originally met in 2004, when Wolf Brother, the first of her bestselling series of children’s novels about stone-age life, appeared. Outcast, number four of a planned six, is published this week,…
Read MoreTop 10 Books About Archaeology & Anthropology
1. The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams A persuasive account of the origins and purpose of the great cave-paintings of western Europe. Drawing evidence from neurology, anthropology and archaeology, Lewis-Williams proposes that the ancient shamans entered caves in order to interact with the spirit world. The walls of the caves were perceived as…
Read MoreThe Serpent’s Tooth
Since she was twelve years old, Belle has lived with a secret – a secret which cuts her off from her family, and isolates her wherever she goes. Against the unfolding horror of the Great War, her search for peace takes her from the brittle gaiety of English country house society to the remote Scottish…
Read MoreFever Hill
Nothing about Sophie Monroe is ‘appropriate’. She’s too outspoken, too determined, and her childhood hero, Ben Kelly, grew up in appalling poverty in the London slums. Her only haven is Eden, the hauntingly beautiful plantation in Jamaica, where her sister Madeleine leads a charmed existence with her husband and children. But when Sophie returns from…
Read MoreMichelle’s First Book
“Without Charity” was Michelle’s first published book. There is a special place in every author’s heart for their debut work… it is often intensely personal in flavour, and usually the result of years of hard toil. We asked Michelle how “Without Charity” came to be – and what it means for her. What made you…
Read MoreLooking After The Trees
The Forest is central to Torak’s world, and it has always struck me as a bit ironic that in order to make the paper to bring readers Torak’s story, masses of trees have to be cut down. However, some forms of paper are more environmentally friendly than others. For instance, some paper comes from trees…
Read MoreA Magnificent Obsession
Authors often suffer from “Second Book Syndrome” – after a promising debut, the next book is both challenging to write and harshly judged against the first. In Michelle’s case, there were no such worries. “Glorious storytelling!” enthused Sarah Broadhurst in The Bookseller, picking A Place In The Hills as one of the Big Name Paperbacks…
Read MoreCatching Shadows
Michelle, the setting for The Shadow Catcher is a new one for you… much of the story takes place in colonial Jamaica. How did you go about researching that period? First of all I had to do masses of reading in the British Library, and the Colindale Newspaper Library – which has all the Jamaican…
Read MoreThe Shadow Catcher
EDEN. In the depths of the lush Jamaican forest stands a ruined house of haunting beauty – the last remains of a great estate founded on slavery. Abandoned for decades, it still casts its spell down the generations. A place of dreams, magic and madness. Worlds away, ten-year-old Madeleine’s untroubled Scottish Scottish childhood is cut…
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