Where his skin was marked with short black lines, hers was covered in stars. A whole sky’s worth, or so he thought. August had never seen more than a handful of real stars on nights when the grid went down. But he’d heard about places where the city lights didn’t reach, where there were so many stars you could see by them, even on a moonless night.
“You’re dreaming,” said Ilsa in her singsong way. She rested her chin on top of his shoulder, and squinted. “What is that in your eyes?”
“What?”
“That speck. Right there. Is it fear?” Continue reading
My debut novel, Artefact, was released in February 2016. It is book one of The Lazarus War, and the story continues with Legion, released in the UK and US on 26
It’s an odd occupation, this writing business. You sit alone in a room and make up stuff, and if you’re lucky, you find that someone else likes it, has faith in it, and is willing to put it out in the world for you. If you are even luckier, you make a little money out of the process and find that it becomes a job – a career, even.
Crack open an author’s skull (preferably after drugging them first) and you’ll find a simmering stew of influences floating around in there like a horrible soup. It’s not pretty, but these are the things that shaped me as I grew up and wound up rendering me virtually unemployable, incapable of doing anything except sitting at a desk and typing about imaginary people doing made up things.
It was the title that first came to me: 
Welcome to a world of wind and bone, songs and silence, betrayal and courage.
We humans encounter the world through a very limited set of senses, compared to much of the animal kingdom. Our visual acuity is good but our ability to see colours is crippled by nocturnal ancestors. Birds, reptiles and many grounds of invertebrates see far more bands in the rainbow (if there was a mantis shrimp pride march their flags would be incredible). Our hearing and smell are the shame of Mammalia. What to us is a satisfactory baseline would make dogs cringe with embarassment.
Regeneration, the third and final book of the ®Evolution sequence, is about to drop in North America. Given that it’s been out in the UK for the past eight months, I’ve already done a lot of public meditating on what it’s ‘like’ to have completed the trilogy (short answer: I don’t really know what it’s like. To what can you compare it?). Now I’m thinking about the internationalist dimension. One of the things that I’ve found fascinating, and often surprising, over the past few years is the different ways in which the books have been received and understood in different countries and communities. 
If I had to name one specific story mode I love the most, it would be the closed-arc series.
Civilian Reader 