Tag: Reading

by Finbar Hawkins

When people discover that my new novel GHOST  is set at Christmas, I’m often met with a slightly puzzled look. Ghost stories? At Christmas? Aren’t we supposed to be writing about snow, carols, and the triumph of goodwill?

But scratch beneath the surface of our festive traditions and you’ll find that ghosts and Christmas have been companions for centuries—and for good reason.

I’ve always been fascinated by our impulse to gather in the darkness and scare ourselves witless. Not at Halloween, when we might expect it, but in the depths of winter, at the year’s darkest turning point. The Winter Solstice—that moment when the sun hangs lowest in the sky and the nights stretch their longest—has been a threshold time for as long as humans have told stories. It’s when the veil between worlds grows thin, when the dead draw close, when ancient things stir in the shadows. 

This is why, when I set out to write GHOST, Christmas felt like the only possible setting. The novel weaves together three young women across different time periods, all confronting an ancient evil that lurks in the woods. That evil is timeless, but it makes itself felt most powerfully when darkness reigns—and there’s no darker time in the British calendar than the dead days between the Solstice and New Year, when time itself seems suspended and the normal rules don’t quite apply. 

Our ancestors understood this instinctively. Take Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that strange and unsettling medieval masterpiece. It begins at Christmas, at the height of Arthur’s Yuletide feast, when a monstrous green knight crashes the party and sets in motion a tale of magic, fear, and the supernatural. The poem is steeped in midwinter unease—the sense that something other is abroad when the world is frozen and dark. The Green Knight himself seems to embody the wild, unkillable force of nature at its most hostile and alien. He’s a Christmas ghost in all but name. 

Fast forward several centuries and we find M.R. James, that master of the antiquarian ghost story, making a conscious art form of the Christmas tale of terror. As a teacher at Eton, James would gather his pupils around the fire each Christmas Eve and read them a new ghost story he’d written especially for the occasion. Can you imagine it? The oldest, most prestigious school in England, and here was a distinguished scholar frightening boys in the darkness with tales of ancient curses, malevolent spirits, and things that should not be disturbed. James understood that Christmas wasn’t just about comfort and joy—it was about acknowledging the darkness, facing our fears communally, and emerging into the light together. 

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Can you imagine it? The oldest, most prestigious school in England, and here was a distinguished scholar frightening boys in the darkness with tales of ancient curses, malevolent spirits, and things that should not be disturbed.

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For me, though, the book that truly crystallised this tradition was Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. Reading it as a young person was a formative experience—I can still remember the visceral sensation of cold that emanated from its pages, the way Cooper made me feel the bite of winter and the weight of ancient evil pressing against the fragile warmth of Christmas.

Will Stanton’s battle against the Dark unfolds across the twelve days of Christmas, and Cooper understands implicitly that this is when such battles must be fought—when the year is at its most vulnerable, when the old magic is strongest, when everything hangs in the balance. The book showed me that Christmas stories could be more than cosy—they could be mythic, terrifying, and profound. They could matter. 

And then there’s Dickens. A Christmas Carol is so embedded in our festive culture that we sometimes forget how genuinely spooky it is. Yes, it ends in redemption and generosity, but it earns that ending through four ghostly visitations, a journey through death and regret, and the terrifying vision of what Scrooge himself will become.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is as frightening as anything in M.R. James—a silent, hooded figure of absolute dread. Dickens knew what he was doing. His story works precisely because it harnesses that ancient connection between Christmas and the uncanny. 

Why does this tradition endure? I think it’s because the Christmas season, for all its manufactured jollity, sits on something much older and darker. It’s a festival of light precisely because we’re surrounded by darkness. We feast because winter was always a time of potential starvation. We huddle together because the world outside is hostile. And we tell ghost stories because, in the darkest part of the year, we need to acknowledge what scares us—and then, together, we need to survive it and emerge into the growing light. 

In GHOST, I wanted to honour this tradition: to write a story that embraces the darkness of midwinter and asks what might be lurking there, waiting. Because some stories are best told when the nights are long, the fire is burning low, and we’re not quite sure what’s out there in the shadows. 

GHOST

60AD A blackbird calls a warning. Aine, a slave girl running away from her Roman masters, pauses to listen as she lifts a totemic, druid carving she’s found in the tunnel where she’s hiding. The last thing she sees is a tangle of matted fur, a sheaf of claws, a flash of fangs, as she unleashes a hungry animal presence.

1783 AD Centuries later, white witch Sarah Gibson wanders the woods in search of refuge. She’s at ease here with the changing seasons, the plants and animals, until one moonlit night, she senses Aine’s terror. The blackbird calls a warning, but Sarah wants to help Aine’s restless spirit.

Present day Marie has dropped out of art college and is staying with her aunt for a while. But the woods nearby are hiding something. Marie can feel it. She hears the local gossip about tragic happenings there. Hopelessly caught by the ghostly voices of the past that echo uneasily in her present, Marie must pit her wits against powerful old magic..

by Miranda Moore

Let’s picture a professional author. They sit down in their hut at the end of the garden, sipping their favourite tea from their favourite mug, a beatific smile forming as they pen a perfect draft of a perfect novel. They type ‘The End’ and hit send. Job done!

They amble back across the lawn to their Edwardian townhouse, where their secretary awaits. Steven Spielberg’s on the phone, wanting to make a movie of their latest book. Would they like to take the call?

OK, let’s make that scene a bit less Hollywood and a bit more reality TV.

Here’s another professional author. She’s sitting in her messy study in her dressing gown, a hot water bottle shoved up her jumper. Three emails ping in from her kids’ school – forms needing filled in.

The doorbell rings and she listens politely as a man and woman tell her that unless she repents her sins, she’s heading for eternal damnation, and wouldn’t she like to save her soul from this fate? Then she finds her cat toying with a terrified vole in the kitchen. She manages to banish the cat and save the vole. Hurray!

Her phone rings. No, she doesn’t need loft insulation, thanks.

Finally, she gets to work. She picks up the latest draft of her novel – she’s not entirely sure how many drafts she’s done, but it’s a lot more than one. She slashes paragraphs, scores out phrases, adds in better ones and scribbles notes down the margins. The paper is a shambolic mess of marks but she is curiously pleased. It’s progress.

Most writers don’t just sit down, struck by inspiration, and produce perfect novels on a first attempt. Most of us have sweated, sighed, sobbed and sworn for years before we become published novelists.

I wrote the first draft of my debut novel in 2016. Nine years later, that novel has just been published, having changed title twice and been though many revisions.

When I first sent it out, it had a long way to go. I queried a few agents and got several full manuscript requests. None of those turned into an offer of representation, but the feedback was invaluable. It simply wasn’t properly baked yet.

I also entered national novel competitions, and was quickly shortlisted for one in 2017, the first of many longlistings and shortlistings. Each time I got listed but didn’t make it further, I went back to my manuscript and asked myself: what can I improve? What’s not quite there yet? What more does it need?

And each time, with several months’ break from it, that distance provided clarity. I was able to see things I had been unable to see when I was too close to it. Feedback from critique group friends, beta readers and a manuscript appraisal service helped enormously. All along, I kept my eye on my goal: publication with a traditional publisher.

Most writers don’t just sit down, struck by inspiration, and produce perfect novels on a first attempt. Most of us have sweated, sighed, sobbed and sworn for years before we become published novelists.

What I didn’t do was sit for seven years, waiting. I got on with other things. I took freelance writing commissions and editing jobs. I wrote gift books about mindfulness. I returned to the manuscript from time to time, read it, listened to it while doing yoga (I’m not joking – I got the Speech function on my computer to read it out to me). This way, I could hear passages that dragged or felt underdeveloped. And I wrote a second novel.

In all, I was longlisted six times, shortlisted three and won twice. That’s eleven competitions. There’s a pattern. Each time, I was inching closer. Each time, I had to go back to the factory floor and examine my work with a critical eye, to try to find the weaknesses; to see where it needed refining. Each time, I returned to the text and interrogated it. There was always something that could be tightened.

Of course, there’s inevitable disappointment when you get listed and don’t make it. You’ve poured your heart and soul into this. Who wouldn’t be temporarily crushed? But you pick yourself up and think: OK, the winning book is simply better than mine. I still have work to do. My time will come.

Overnight successes are rare. Most authors have honed their craft over years. So if your dream is to become a published writer, I recommend seeing it as an apprenticeship.

First, you need to learn the craft, with a dose of humility. You need to be able to listen to feedback. When people give you constructive criticism, they’re only trying to help. Some things they say won’t chime with you, so stick with your gut. Other times, their comments will illuminate something for you and help to highlight the scenes or characters that need work.

Beyond that, you need perseverance, a willingness to keep improving, a decent dollop of self-belief, and an unshakeable desire to reach that goal. There is nothing wrong with a little healthy ambition. It just means you’ll keep grafting until you get there.

Good luck and enjoy the trip!

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A Beautiful, Terrible Thing

When Nathan meets Cara, sparks fly.

Her smile lights him up, and he falls for her fast. Being with her is like taking a deep breath, after the terrible thing that happened three months ago.

Cara feels the same. And this joy is a gift – because her life is shattered, too. Nathan feels like a new start.

But they’re both hiding a secret. And the secrets intertwine in a way neither of them could imagine.

There’s no way Cara and Nathan can be together. But, despite everything, they find it impossible to be apart.

by Ava Eldred

In one of the first lines in my new novel, Exit Stage Death, our main character Livi makes the observation that musical theatre and murder mysteries are actually pretty similar.

I won’t share her justification here (you’ll have to read it!) but I realised in the writing of the book that while our reasoning is different, I mostly agree with her, and that those similarities are one of the reasons it was the most fun I’ve ever had with a writing project.

I’ve worked in theatre myself for over 15 years, so in some senses bringing that world in to my YA novels was inevitable, but since I write murder mysteries, it wasn’t immediately obvious how the two might intersect.

When I thought about it a little more deeply, though, I realised that quite a lot of the things that can be taken from enjoying musicals can also be applied to mystery novels. Both allow a level of escape that feels safer, somehow, than other art forms tackling the same subjects might allow.

That is not to say that either musical theatre or YA murder mysteries sanitise things – more that, in adding the heightened layers that bring a little unreality to proceedings – the singing and dancing that we’d probably never come across in real life, the way YA protagonists have of becoming the default investigator that is unlikely outside of novels, we give the audience a way of processing things at a slight remove.

Fear is allowed to give way to thrills. Looking at it like that was part of the inspiration for Exit Stage Death – murder aside, the book tackles the complexities of coming of age, and finding a sense of belonging, which are things that all teenagers will come up against. The idea to set those growing up moments at a musical theatre summer camp, where a fellow camper is found dead on the third day, followed very quickly.

I’ve never met a teenage girl who didn’t like solving puzzles, whether that’s who the rogue arm in their friends Instagram photo belongs to, or who the killer is in their favourite book.

When it comes to theatre, and particularly my own creative work within it, I’ve always been more interested in work that holds a mirror up to the real world than going in for pure escapism. There is absolutely a place for both, but when I think about my favourite contemporary shows, there’s always a layer of something real that elevates them from good pieces of theatre to my all time greats.

The way that Next to Normal explores complex mental health conditions through song and dance, and even how less obviously dark shows like Wicked delve in to the complexities of female friendship and fitting in, make them a really enjoyable way of approaching and untangling scenarios that we may one day be faced with in our day to day lives.

I feel very similar about YA murder mysteries, both the ones I’ve written and many that I’ve read – YA authors are so brilliant at cutting right to the heart of the matter, and teenage audiences are so open to emotion in a way that adult readers sometimes resist, which makes them the perfect readers to explore things that are objectively terrifying, like murder, through a lens that usually isn’t. It’s facing the scary thing, whether that’s emotional or physical, and finding a way to unpack it.

I’m also always keen to make sure the protagonists in my novels have agency and, even when they’re afraid, find a way to use it. Teenage girls are so smart, and in a society that often tries to gaslight us in to thinking that isn’t the case, I think it’s our job as writers to push back against that every chance we get. That intelligence, too, is a reason murder mysteries are so appealing to this audience – when done well, they allow the reader to feel clever, give them something to push up against, and something to solve.

I’ve never met a teenage girl who didn’t like solving puzzles, whether that’s who the rogue arm in their friends Instagram photo belongs to, or who the killer is in their favourite book.

When I think of myself as a teenager, so many of the things that were most important to me weren’t things I saw represented in TV, or film, or other forms of culture. My platonic friendships were my most important love stories, and having interests like theatre and reading to throw myself into made so many things a whole lot more enjoyable.

My teenage self would have loved Exit Stage Death, if I do say so myself – there are plenty of platonic love stories, a touch of romance, questions to be answered, and a whole lot of songs to be sung along the way.

My biggest hope for this book is that the teenagers of 2025 who feel the same find it, and perhaps feel like someone understands.

Exit Stage Death

Livi Campbell’s summer to-do list is simple:

1. Have the best final summer at Camp Chance.
2. Prove to her parents that acting is an acceptable career choice.
3. Smash all her rehearsals and get the lead in the senior showcase.

But when a fellow camper shows up dead under mysterious circumstances and Livi finds a note suggesting all is not as it seems, she must team up with her campmates to catch the culprit before they kill again.

Enter Juliet, the social media influencer with everything to prove; Aaron, the nepo baby who isn’t sure he wants to be in Hollywood at all; Daisy, the inexperienced newbie trying to find her place; and Sam, the leading man who broke Livi’s heart last summer.

The players are in place. The stage is set. Curtain up.