when love becomes obsession
Six-year-old Matthew and his older sister Sophie
enjoy what seems to be an idyllic childhood. Free
from parental restrictions, they play together in the
old barn and in the woods and fields around their
house, and hunt for fossils in the disused quarry
where Sophie keeps her secrets. There are just the
two of them: their mother leads her own, mysterious
life and their baby brother does not live long
enough to intrude.

Mattie hero-worships his all-knowing sister and
believes that their childhood will last forever. But
Sophie is growing up, and the secrets in her life
can't be hidden forever. As they start to escape,
they affect her brother in shocking and unforseen
ways as his childish terrors become and all-too
dreadful reality.

For Mattie, too, has his secrets...
what the critics said
'The novel streams past you with a terrible and purposeful intensity, unrolling like a bad dream...
combines the creepy narrative power of a young William Golding with a disturbingly accurate
memory of what it is like to be a child... in this spooky second novel he has produced something so
good that one can only wonder what he will do next' Libby Purves, The Times

'Tantalising and riveting' Sarah Broadhurst, Today

'A gripping tale of an obsessive relationship' Company

'A tense psychological thriller... watch this writer go places' Maureen Freely, Options

'The intensity of the closing chapters surpasses what has gone before. Sophie is hard to fault... a
stunning achievement' Time Out
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author commentary
Sophie was written during my second year at university. Oxford colleges let you live in during your
first and third years, but during your second, you're thrown to the mercy of Oxford's many
landlords and landladies and expected to fend for yourself.

In the life of a student, 'living out' is a combination of previously undreamt-of freedom and a kind of
baptism by fire: loads of people have never cooked for themselves / changed a fuse / lived with six
other people in the house / shared a fridge / worn seven jumpers because they can't afford the
heating before. My 'digs' (accommodation) was way, way out of central Oxford, and though it had
the advantage of being a lot cheaper than many places, it had the undeniable disadvantage of a
live-in landlady. A very old, very mad Italian lady, she made most of the traditional student
passtimes difficult and many impossible. I quickly learnt to spend my time elsewhere - crashing on
people's floors, scrounging in their kitchens, and for the second and third terms pretty much
moving in with my girlfriend (who had a college room and was studying like crazy for Finals, so
probably didn't notice me all that much). But every now and again I'd return to digs, brave the
landlady, and add another five thousand words to Sophie.

The story in Sophie covers some of the ground that I felt I'd touched on in After the Hole, but
which I also felt I could have explored more fully in that book. It's again a story with a dark heart: the
driving impulse behind it is one of obsession - Mattie's obsession with Sophie, his sister, and
Sophie's obsession with protecting what she sees as her little brother's innocence, against a world
which she knows has robbed her of hers.

This time, though, I wanted to get up much closer to the central character. While After the Hole had
left Martyn scheming in the shadows, concentrating instead on his victims, Sophie was intended
to redress the balance by taking us right into the life and mind of someone capable of truly
terrifying things. Sophie's saving grace - if she has one - is that she genuinely believes that what
she's doing is for Mattie's good, even though we know that years later it will have left him mentally
scarred and desperate to force her to confront her responsibility for his state. Emotionally, then, I
was aiming for something a little less clear-cut than After the Hole, where Martyn is never explored
enough to allow the reader to sympathise with him in any meaningful way. With Sophie, the trick
was to make the reader simultaneously repulsed by and compassionate towards this child.

It was also with Sophie that I realised that, in writing about children, I need not be writing a
children's book. The territory of childhood is central to the novel (and remains central to The
Dandelion Clock) but the import of the story isn't, I hope, childish. This was good news for me,
because I was acutely aware (at the grand old age of 21 or so) that I had nothing of any interest of
sense to say about the adult world. I wasn't in it, hadn't seen much of it; I couldn't imagine
attempting a novel with adult characters. There wasn't really much choice except to write about
children. Realising that this needn't be an impediment - might, actually, be a strength I could make
my own - was tremendously reassuring.

Sophie, then, feels to me like the sister novel to After the Hole: exploring a similar territory in terms
of psychology, from a different angle.