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Sample chapters for Effra and A Valley Apart are below. To download a pdf of the full manuscript, click the links:

A Valley Apart sample

Beth slammed against the side of the pick-up as the truck cornered wildly, pain exploding in her face as her eye socket hit the side of the tray. With ankles cinched together by plastic ties, and wrists bound behind her back, the best she could do to protect herself was to clench her body and tuck her chin down to shield her face. She heard the engine rev madly as they bounced out of a pothole and for a moment she was suspended, cushioned by the canvas cover above, before slamming back into the deck.

On and on they went, the truck never seeming to leave second gear, while Beth slid around in the back like a sack of dirt. There was a moment when she thought she heard helicopters, but then gunfire erupted and the sound of rotors swung away. At some point after that the tempo of their flight seemed to change; the driver shifted gears, the engine slowed, and the mad swerving gave way to a steady rattle – with the occasional bounce as they hit a rock. For the first time in hours Beth felt like she could breathe – and hold a thought without having it battered from her head.

It seemed there were others in here with her; she figured two, though she’d taken a while to realise. She had only clicked when something heavy rolled between her and the side, giving blessed relief from being bashed against the metal, and she’d heard them gasping and grunting as they’d braced for impact.

A gag was in her mouth. Above, a greenish light pricked with white came through the worn canvas, while a reddish glow filtered down the sides. Dust and grit were everywhere, burning her nose and stinging her eyes. But when she squeezed them shut an image from the attack that afternoon looped behind her eyelids, as clear as if she was standing in the midday sun: the man with a red beard who had watched their convoy. She had been close enough to see his lips moving, counting off the distance as their first car passed, then he’d looked at her, lifted something in his hand, and vanished – disappearing before her shocked eyes, to be replaced with light and dust – dust everywhere – and a roaring, ringing silence that had finally faded into muffled shouts and the sound of guns.

The red-beards. The thought of them sent Beth into a sudden full-blown panic – her body seeming to fall away while her mind filled with clouds of numbing fear – until a jolt rapped her head against the deck and the pain shocked her mercifully back to herself; breathing hard into the gag, but in control.

Oh Christ. The red-beards. Her father had told her about them: despised in Isfastan as the only tribe that never traded hostages. Captives they took for interrogation in wartime, but all were killed soon after as a point of pride. 

She was going to die. She felt it not just as a thought, but in the black of her bones. They were going to kill her – and her father too.

She’d seen him bundled into a different vehicle just before they’d taken her. Could it have been their own people pulling him to safety? Beth forced herself to picture the men who’d hauled her father off by his collar – saw in her mind their white robes stained red at the collars by their wiry beards – and gave herself up to despair. 

She let her body go limp on the rattling metal tray as the tears finally came. In the top pocket of her jacket the stiff folded paper of her father’s letter pressed against her ribs. Through the snot and tears Beth almost imagined she could smell the faint spiced odour of the paper and tried to hold it in her mind – the last trace of him she would ever know.

Effra sample

I lurch out of the dance area, my thoughts on the yellow rope. The climb up is… a memory. Something not so much experienced as recalled and at the top I consider flinging the bag over the parapet into the dark. I even pull it out of my pocket, weighing it up for the throw. But instead I just stare at it for a while, fixated by the crinkled white plastic and the drifts of crystals, then stuff it suddenly inside my jacket lining through a hole in the pocket, and the next long while is spent staggering in the grassy area near the Mayor’s office, ignored by the police, avoided by everyone else, trying to gather my thoughts about Anne: finding Anne, I’m finding Anne. How can I find Anne?

Later, I’m with Anne, sitting on the grass in an out-of-the way spot.

She’s looking at me funny and I realise I’m speaking. It’s possible I’m not making sense, because I can’t remember the words, but she says something back.

“So you want to stay here?”

“Yeah.”

“Well I’m going to head off.”

She puts her palm on my cheek. Her hand’s hot.

“Why don’t you come to mine when you’re finished?”

“Okay,” I nod emphatically. It’s a liferaft of an idea. She tells me she’ll leave the key out.

“You know where it will be?”

“Yeah. No.”

Then the next thing she’s fishing a pen out of her bag and rolling up my sleeve. It tickles as she writes on my arm and she looks at me with pursed, amused lips – and that makes me smile. She keeps writing, right down onto my little finger.

I twist my arm and try to read it, but the letters seem to have come loose from their meanings and new ones float in to replace them, distracting me. By the time I get to the end of the sentence on my finger I’ve forgotten what the words on my wrist were about – and anyway, she’s saying something.

“…you look after yourself Mister.”

And her face is reassuring; with a kind of quizzical, rueful concern, but not unfriendly, so I look back at the words again to try to work out what she’s written – and when I look back upwards she’s gone. After a while I realise she really is gone; and as soon as that happens I wish more than anything I’d gone with her.

From there, my mood turns black.

Regret at leaving Anne sours in my belly into general unease and I weave back towards the Embankment edge, taking the long way around people.

I lean on the rails to watch, realising distantly what a total state I’m in. The police seem to have backed off, resigned to letting the party run its course, with just one surly copper keeping watch. And I’m watching the crowd below – they’re still dancing but with a different energy – no longer fuelled by the drama of conflict; settled instead into grim repetition – when suddenly the world floods with an awful sound.

A deep, sonorous moan drowns out the music, crawls up my nerves, and vibrates my diaphragm like an answering drum. As one, the dancers look up over the water to where a ship, waiting on the other side of the bridge, sounds its horn again.

Knowing the cause of my fright should have set me at ease, but instead the second low moan from the ship seems like an omen of disaster: something awful is going to happen. My shoulders crowd up round my ears and as we all look on the platform of Tower Bridge cracks apart. Free of cars now the two sides simply lever up – opening the bridge like a great valve – and the boat moves through, entering the body of the city with ominous purpose. I have to look away.

Below, the dancers stand transfixed. Someone turns down the music and a cheer for the spectacle rises from the crowd. One young man turns around and looks up – olive-skinned, blue trousers, his face beaming – and catches my eye. “Magnifique!” he yells in melodious French. “C’est fucking superb!” but I can’t feel his jubilation for this growing sense of fear.

He punches the air. “Vive la plage!” he yells. “Vive la citié plage!” – but his words get jumbled in my brain. Vive la phage, I hear – the city phage – and the words rattle around, picking up associations every time.

‘Phage’ I whisper to myself. ‘To eat.’ City phage: the city eats. Does the city live? And at that, my dread takes on life of its own.

The presence that I felt at the party – on the evening I met Anne – it comes crowding back. I feel it all around me; a malignant, brooding force. Bigger than me – much bigger – crushing just from the sheer mass of him, and I look around and where there were rails and streets and lights and people I see a body respiring on a grand scale, a brickwork Gaia with pipes for veins and rats for blood and people for thoughts and I look down over the embankment to the river and see his lifeblood, a great thick artery that swells with a heartbeat just twice a day, and the people dancing on the mudflats, their jeans caked with silt, they fill me with horror. I want to yell get out! You have to get out! But I’m rooted to the spot by this thing, this presence around me like a chuckle in a dark room when you thought you were alone, until Kip walks up and says, “Yo” and the spell is broken.