This is the novel I'm working on right now. I had an early draft of it finished about a year ago... and then read it, and realised it needed some further work. It was quite an interesting process (and not always easy): I'll talk more about it in the Blog pages.
The story takes some big contemporary themes, particularly climate change, and views them through the eyes of a girl growing up and trying to understand her place in a radically shifting world. It's also a coming-of-age love story; and a story about stars and telescopes and sea-glass and all kinds of things.
As part of the process of working on and editing the book, I thought it would be a good idea to write a synopsis of it: the kind of blurb you'd find on the back of a paperback, briefly summarising the story.
As an exercise this really helped me to focus on what the novel should be about, and thereby define what elements I should develop further in the rewrite (or cut, and lose completely). Below you can read the synopsis I came up with. If it piques your interest, I'll be talking more about the writing and rewriting process for this book in the newsletter (for which you can sign up below) and The Blog.
We went on holiday. There was a little girl on the beach. She was dead.
A holiday to reconnect with her mum has already gone wrong when fourteen-year-old Noah arrives on the Spanish coast. The idyllic campsite she has imagined turns out to be a trailer park; the town is no longer a cool hippie enclave but a sprawl of concrete tower-blocks and chain pubs; and her mum has had to remain in England, working on the astrophysics project that has consumed most of Noah’s childhood. Instead she’s accompanied by Finn, a colleague of her mother’s and the nearest thing Noah has in her life to a real friend.
But what at first promises to be just a crap holiday to be endured takes a series of unexpected turns. Some will change Noah’s world forever. Some are terrifying.
Just down the road from the campsite Noah discovers a different kind of camp, where African refugees arriving on the Spanish coast are being held behind razorwire fences. Their presence is the focus of increasing tension and unrest as pro-refugee activists begin to clash with right-wing extremists. Noah’s own, private, preoccupation with the climate crisis and what it will mean for her future is given form and voice by the people trapped in the holding pen. Faced with holidaying teens partying all night, while Finn looks to the skies for distant answers to the mysteries of the universe, Noah sets out to unravel the issues right in front of her.
The swirl of events comes to a crisis point when, after a sudden storm, Noah and Finn discover the body of a dead child washed up on the beach. As local reaction to the news spirals into open violence, Noah and the people she loves are all caught in the crossfire.