Mandrake Petals and Scattered Feathers

2019 Friday 11th October Atticus Books/Lancaster Music Festival Friday 17th May Light Night at Blackburne House, Liverpool 2018 Thursday 1st March Hilbre High School Thursday 7th June St. Martin's Gallery, Lincoln Thursday 18th October The Arts Centre, Edge Hill University with live music by Hannah James and Giles Lewin 2017 Wednesday 8th February: News From Nowhere bookshop, Liverpool w/Emily Portman Sunday May 7th The Atkinson, Southport Friday 13th October: Lancaster Library Friday 20th October: Birkenhead Library Monday 30th October: Greenbank High School, Southport 8th/9th/10th December Lincoln Christmas Fair 2016 17th February: Collective Encounters, Liverpool Thursday 24th March: Liverpool Blue Coat School Friday 22nd April: Birkenhead Library Monday 04 July: Archbishop Blanch High School, Liverpool Saturday 01 October: West Kirby Arts Centre, Wirral, Merseyside Wednesday 19th October: Towcester Writers, Northants Thursday 20th October: Sponne School, Towcester Thursday 20th October: BBC Radio Northampton Saturday 3rd December: Lincoln Christmas Fair book signing 2015 2nd March: University of Lincoln 11th May: "The Puzzle" pub, Sowerby Bridge 13th May: The Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool 17th May The Larry Neild Report, City Talk Radio, Liverpool 29th May: New Hutte Community Centre, Halewood 18th June: Schools Library Association Conference, Stafford 25th June: Wilgress Books, Lincoln 25th June: BBC Radio Lincolnshire 26th June: Lincoln City Radio 9th December: BBC Radio Lincolnshire

These tales are set in the liminal space of the forest where nothing is quite what it seems. Shape-shifting and trickery lurk behind every tree; and the figures we glimpse through the mist are mutable and indeterminate.Mandrake Petals and Scattered Feathers is a tapestry of intertwined tales. We meet rogues, ne'er-do-wells and shapeshifters. Pickapple, the loveable trickster at the crossroads, Mullops, who falls prey to him on a number of occasions, Elmskin, the lovelorn, who is searching for Rimmony, the love of his life, who has just dropped everything and gone off in search of Flax Wing, a potentially mythic being who she thinks she saw once bathing in a clearing by the river and who she believes has spoken to her. Mandrake Petals and Scattered Feathers intertwines the stories of these characters and many others into a complex but moreish whole that draws the reader in and won't let go. Extracts: * The Keeper of Secrets lived in the hollow of an old tree. There he would sit and listen to the mutterings of a raddled old rook, a fox with three legs, a stub-footed pigeon and a one-eyed frog. And the hedgers, bodgers and ditchers would come and the charcoal-burners too. And the girlen who tended the geese and the old'uns and the potswills and those that had forgotten they ever had secrets at all. They would come to the tree and Old Snick, for that was his name, he would listen. But truth to tell, he did not keep these secrets well, for he would whisper them to the wind and the leaves as they fell and the babble of the nearby stream. * The lane became a tunnel of green, with brambles writhing either side. It had always been there, though Elmskin had never come this way before. He knew about it, of course. He'd heard the girlen talking and they always seemed to know. And the old'uns would mutter and whisper in corners. But he'd never seen it, didn't know where it might take him. He took a breath and ducked his head to make his way through when a wizened nut-brown figure swung down from the bough above. He stood half as tall as Elmskin, yet firmly blocked his...