Gravenhead

The age of coal has passed. Rosengrave mining town, northern Wales is a throwaway land of mist and quartz; slate and coal. LOTS of coal, lying unwanted in ground heaps; in abandoned and unmined seams. So Rosengrave is dying, cast aside to the mercies of the economic winds. Even the hottest summer ever recorded is doing little to lift the spirits of the town and its inhabitants.Morwen Lundy, an introspective, asocial teenager traumatised by past bullying at school and divorce at home has an ace up her sleeve to help her get out of town She's found the lost village of Gravenhead, hidden all the while beneath an isolated lake she's come across in the mountains. But the lake is drying up in record temperatures and as the levels recede and the village is exposed, Morwen finds that the layers are coming off her own town, as well: that not all monsters are buried under deep water, and that some ghosts find it hard to go to sleep.

Richard Thorns graduated at MA level in Writing for Children in 1998, following the completion of a BA in Writing and Publishing Studies. Most of his books are for children, but Gravenhead is his first complete novel in the Magical Realism genre. ＂I really liked the idea of the two towns, the dead and the dying one each containing their own monsters,＂ says the author, ＂I felt there was so much there to play around with, and I was determined, for once, not to set the book out mostly in my mind before I began writing it; this way, when Morwen and Bethan went around a corner in the lost village of Gravenhead, they didn’t know what was around the corner and neither did I! ＂I hit on the idea of Morwen’s story and Bethan’s story both featuring in the book because I felt that setting it in the third person (as the first draft was) it ’shared’ the story a little too much: it made the story everybody’s, but it didn’t really belong to anyone in particular. However, setting it in the ’I’ first person didn’t work either, because you had these two conflicting characters each making up 50% of the story, each doing things while the other one wasn’t looking. Eventually I hit on the idea of it being a ’remembered story’, with each girl character doffing their cap to the majesty of the lost village by writing their ’Books’ to make up a collective memory. At last this worked really well for two reasons: for a start I could then cheat and use the first person: ’I’ (even though there were two characters in the story), but also because it opened a whole new window into the conflict: to paraphrase, Morwen could say: ＂I’m glad I managed to make Bethan fall for that one,＂ and in the very next ’book’ Bethan could say: ＂I can’t believe Morwen thought I’d fall for that one! All in all, it was a lot of fun! I had a great time writing it.＂ So... the hottest summer has come, the lake is receding in the heat, and Gravenhead waits for its discovery.