This is an eclectic list of books which have in some way influenced my writing, and/or how I perceive the natural world.  All are beautifully written.  If you don’t know them, I’d urge you to try one or two. 1.  The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling Fresh, vivid and unpatronizing, this is the most marvellous…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A chance meeting on a railway journey unleashed a chain of events that changed Michelle’s life… and set her firmly on the right track… The man on the train didn’t look like a guardian angel. He looked as if he had just blown in from a tropical photo-shoot. He wore a safari jacket, combat pants…