Authors & Books

Available to option

“Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest, moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mother’s favourite. And he was a murderer.”  

B.B. is a forty-two-year-old hospital porter still living at home with his mother in a Yorkshire village.  His social life is played out online, on a website called badguysrock.  There he stalks Albertine, with whom he shares a troubled past, and spins dark murder fantasies - especially about his mother.  As the story of their tortured relationship unravels, so does that of his blood feud with his brothers, the poignant tale of a blind child prodigy, and the poisonous truth lurking in the rotting heart of one disturbed family.    Blueeyedboy is an intricately plotted thriller that plays on the myriad opportunities for disguise, multiple personalities and mind games that are offered by the internet and shows, in a cascade of heartstopping twists, how a fantasy life can erupt into the real world with unpredictable and devastating results.

Available to option

Number 43 of 101 things to do before you’re five:

Break the DVD player:

Watch Daddy carefully. See how he’s taking his favorite World at War disc from the DVD player? See that button that makes the tray pop out? When daddy leaves the room, take the time to familiarize yourself with this process – over and over again. And now that he’s taken his favorite thing out of the machine, why don’t you feed your favorite thing in to it? A large rice cake fits perfectly. Give it a quick suck around the edges before putting it on the tray to make sure it sticks. Or the humble jam sandwich, cut up nice and small and squished right in to the tray, always works like a treat…

Optioned to Left Bank Pictures

Nobody likes The Complaints - they're the cops who investigate other cops. Complaints and Conduct Department, to give them their full title, but known colloquially as 'The Dark Side', or simply 'The Complaints'. It's where Malcolm Fox works. He's just had a result, and should be feeling good about himself. But he's a man with problems of his own. He has an increasingly frail father in a care home and a sister who persists in an abusive relationship - something which Malcolm cannot seem to do anything about. But, in the midst of an aggressive Edinburgh winter, the reluctant Fox is given a new task. There's a cop called Jamie Breck, and he's dirty. The problem is, no one can prove it. But as Fox takes on the job, he learns that there's more to Breck than anyone thinks. This knowledge will prove dangerous, especially when a vicious murder intervenes far too close to home for Fox's liking.

Available to option

Margaret Forster, in this engaging, intriguing novel, about a young woman and two grandmothers, uncovers the shocking truths that family history reveals. The curiously named Isamay, a would-be academic, is trying to write a coherent thesis about grandmothers in history - from Sarah Bernhardt and George Sand to the matriarchal Queen Victoria and other influential grannies - while constantly ambushed by the secrets her own family has been keeping. An only child, she is named after her grandmothers, Isa and May, who were there at her birth and who have formed and influenced her in very different ways. Jealous of each other, they both want to be first in their granddaughter's affections. Isa has an edge, in that young Isamay looks like her, but Isa's reserved and elegant exterior hides startling surprises that could undermine her granddaughter's certainties. May, on the other hand, is plump, indomitable and opinionated, and it's from her that Isamay inherits her stubborn determination. Isamay, almost thirty, has never wanted children, but suddenly considers changing her mind. Her live-in lover, Ian (always mysterious about his own family history) is sure that he does not want a child. Engrossing, set in the present but with hooks into the past, this is an unusual story about grandmothers and their potentially powerful role in family life, about nature vs nurture, bloodlines and bridges across generations.

Available to option

Adrian Mole is 39 and a quarter. Unable to afford the mortgage on his riverside apartment, he has been forced to move into a semi-detached converted pigsty next door to his parents, George and Pauline. His ravishing wife Daisy loathes the countryside, longs for Dean Street and has yet to buy a pair of Wellingtons; they are both aware the passion has gone out of their marriage, but neither knows how to reignite the flame. To cap it all off, Adrian is leaving his bed numerous times a night to go to the lavatory and has other alarming symptoms, leading him to suspect prostate trouble. Meanwhile, his mother thinks that an appearance on the Jeremy Kyle show might solve the mystery of her daughter’s paternity once and for all. And when George is asked to provide a DNA sample, will the shock kill him? He is already disabled, though still chain smoking and has had an ashtray welded onto the arm of his wheelchair. As Adrian’s worries multiply, a phone call to his old flame Dr Pandora Braithwaite, BA, MA, PhD, MP and Junior Minister in the Foreign Office, ignites memories of a shared passion and makes him wonder – is she the only one who can save him now?

The Hawkwood trilogy (Ratcatcher, Resurrectionist and Rapscallion) featuring the ultimate ‘Period James Bond’ Matthew Hawkwood is now available for option.

Ratcatcher: Hunting down highwaymen was not the usual preserve of a Bow Street Runner.  As the most resourceful of this elite band of investigators, Matthew Hawkwood was surprised to be assigned the case – even if it did involve the murder and mutilation of a naval courier.  Soon Hawkwood finds himself pursuing a trail that leads him from the squalor of St Giles Rookery, London’s notorious den of thieves and cutthroats, to the brightly lit salons of the aristocracy and the heart of the British Government.  But it is only with the discovery of a corpse on the banks of the Thames that the true agenda behind the robbery begins to emerge and a dark conspiracy is revealed.  Napoleon’s agents are preparing to launch an assassination attempt that will turn the tide of the war – and only Hawkwood can stop them. 

Available to option

'There were many staff at Kensington Palace, fulfilling many roles; a man who was employed to catch rats, another whose job it was to sweep the chimneys. That there was someone expected to hunt Demons did not shock the new Queen; that it was to be her was something of a surprise.' London, 1838. Queen Victoria is crowned; she receives the orb, the sceptre, and an arsenal of blood-stained weaponry. Because if Britain is about to become the greatest power of the age, there's the small matter of the demons to take care of first...But rather than dreaming of demon hunting, it is Prince Albert who occupies her thoughts. Can she dedicate her life to saving her country when her heart belongs elsewhere? With lashings of glistening entrails, decapitations, and foul demons, this masterly new portrait will give a fresh understanding of a remarkable woman, a legendary monarch, and quite possibly the best Demon Hunter the world has ever seen ...A E Moorat weaves a seamlessly lurid tapestry of royal biography, gothic horror and fist-gnawing comedy as he lifts the veil on what really took place on the dark and cobbled streets of 19th-century England  

Available to option

Seeking refuge and anonymity in the cobbled streets of Montmartre, Yanne and her daughters, Rosette and Annie, live peacefully, if not happily, above their little chocolate shop. Nothing unusual marks them out; no red sachets hang by the door. The wind has stopped – at least for a while. Then into their lives blows Zozie de L’Alba, the lady with the lollipop shoes, and everything begins to change.

Optioned

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Film rights purchased by UGC (in production); television rights optioned to Sally Head Productions.

George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. ‘The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.’ Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. The way these damaged people fall apart – and come together – as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

Optioned to Element Films. To be adapted and directed by Lenny Abrahamson

Only four men commanded Nazi extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps. Franz Stangl was one of them; he commanded Treblinka and was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter there of at least 900,000 people. Aiming to discover how human beings were turned into instruments of such overwhelming evil, Gitta Sereny investigates Stangl's mind, and the influences which shaped him. Having talked to him for weeks and conducted months of research, she portrays the man as he saw himself and as he was seen by others, including his wife.

Available to option

Above a small village in Spain, an English costume designer sees a bright shining star lurch abruptly across the sky. On Christmas day a strong, silent man with blank eyes enters bar Noche Azul. Only a thirteen-year-old boy could have guessed that there was any connections between the two. Wonderfully inventive, darkly funny and thoughtful, Mister Roberts is both an original coming-of-age story and an unusual take on the corrupting influence of power.

Available to option

Jean Clocker is conceived by her mother Wisteria only as a means to entrap a damaged First World War veteran into marriage. Having achieved wedlock but failed in her plan to rid herself of the now-redundant snare, Wisteria visits maternal tyranny on Jean with enthusiasm and diabolical skill.

“Little Gods„ is dark, comic and deeply romantic. At times reminiscent of the work of John Irving and Michael Chabon, it is one of the most original, moving and inventive novels of recent years.

Available to option

‘Your child is missing – presumed dead.’ Hours after receiving the phone call that every mother dreads, Alida Salter flies to India to search for her backpacker daughter. The discovery of disturbing collages in Mia's hotel makes Alida suspect a connection between the disaster that fractured their relationship thirteen years ago, and Mia's recent, mysterious disappearance. Mia is no ordinary girl. Growing up with the sensory condition synaesthesia – where she sees the world in a kaleidoscope of shapes, colours and smells – she has gone through life with the vivid imagination of an artist, but for years she has shouldered an overwhelming burden of guilt. It has been a difficult relationship, but now comes the toughest test of all … Alida must find the courage to trust her maternal instincts, or lose her daughter forever.

Optioned to Fox Studios

After a nasty incident with a goat, the Troll family are forced to leave there native Norway and make a new home somewhere else. Unfortunately they choose the quiet suburb of Biddlesden. Faced with the prospect of ‘Baked Bean’ for dinner, and the awful spectre of ‘The Shower’, things are going to get ugly (and possibly hairy and smelly, too). But worst of all, they are moved next door to the Priddle family. Big mistake.

Television rights purchased (Granada TV – tx 2006); film rights available from October 2009.

A novel about family life and the horrors and hilarity of caring for elderly relatives. Laura would like a baby, but Nick isn't keen, children are one responsibility too many. Nick's problem is his parents. He is devoted to them, but they are getting old and eccentric. The time has come to take the matter in hand, but it must be done carefully.

Optioned

Lydia Weekes is a beautiful young woman, although she hardly knows it. Her volatile husband all but ignores her and then he is gone completely, leaving her to support their son Charlie on her own with longer shifts at the local factory. A secretive schoolboy, Charlie is increasingly left to his own rich imagination – until he meets the town's new female GP, who encourages his interest in her beehives. This is the 1950s: when patients sit in front of a doctor's home fire in a carpeted waiting room, abortion is illegal and sexual freedom a source of scandal. When a wary friendship between Charlie's mother and Dr Jean Markham becomes a startling and renewing love affair, their secret passion invites suspicion from Lydia's vindictive sister-in-law, Pam, threatening the safety of her son.

Available to option

Johannes Cabal, a brilliant scientist and notorious snob, is obsessed with raising the dead. Tormented by a dark and harrowing secret, he travels to the fiery pits of hell to retrieve his soul, long ago sold to the Devil. Satan, incredibly bored and hungry for a challenge, proposes a little wager: Johannes has one year to persuade one hundred people to sign over their souls or he will lose his forever. To keep things interesting, he generously throws in a traveling carnival to help Johannes collect on the bargain. With little time to lose, Johannes raises a crew from the dead and enlists his brother, Horst, a charismatic vampire, to be his right-hand man. Once on the road, Johannes and his troupe of reprobates cause mayhem at every stop. But are his tricks enough to beat the Devil at his own game?

Available to option

Published by MacMillan, 2006 It is 1940. The Spanish Civil War is over, and Madrid lies ruined, its people starving, while the Germans continue their relentless march through Europe. And as Britain stands alone, General Franco considers whether to abandon neutrality and enter the war. Into this uncertain world comes Harry Brett, ex-public schoolboy, traumatised veteran of Dunkirk and, now, reluctant spy for the British Secret Service. Sent to gain the confidence of Sandy Forsyth, an old school friend turned shady Madrid businessman, he finds himself involved in a dangerous game - and surrounded by memories. Meanwhile Sandy's girlfriend, ex-Red Cross nurse Barbara Clare, is engaged on a secret mission of her own – to find her former lover Bernie Piper, whose passion for the Communist cause led him into the International Brigades, and who vanished on the bloody battlefields of the Jarama. In Winter in Madrid C.J. Sansom brilliantly conjures with delicate tipping points in history, using their complexities to throw his characters into morally fraught situations. The result is a gripping novel of spies, greed and betrayal.

Optioned to Big Fish Films

Henry Stanfield, the newly arrived Truth Commissioner, is troubled by his estrangement from his daughter and struggling with the consequences of his infidelities. Francis Gilroy, veteran Republican and recently appointed government minister, risks losing what feels tantalisingly close to his grasp. In America, Danny and his girlfriend plan for the arrival of their first child, happily oblivious to what is about to pull him back to Belfast and rupture the life they have started together. Retired detective James Fenton, on his way to an orphanage in Romania with a van full of supplies, will soon be forced to confront what he has come to think of as his betrayal, years before, of a teenage boy.

In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, four men's lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. In a community where truth is often tribal and partial, the secret they share threatens to destroy what they have each built in the present. David Park pieces together these individual stories to create a powerful tale that transcends both time and place. Moving, insightful and utterly involving, The Truth Commissioner is an important novel from one of Ireland's greatest writers.