A Hat-trick for Howell

The Garden of Lost Secrets / The House of One Hundred Clocks / Mystery of the Night Watchers by Ann-Marie Howell (Usborne, 2019/2020/2021)

Moondial by Helen Cresswell (Faber, 1987)

A Small Pinch of Weather (contains The Serial Garden) by Joan Aiken (Jonathan Cape, 1969)

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (Oxford, 1958)

Tatty Apple by Jenny Nimmo (Methuen, 1984)

The books I grew up with, as for many grown up readers, still hold a cherished place in my heart. I grew up in the heyday of a kind of second Golden Age of children's fiction when Kaye Webb's tenure at Puffin Books cast its spell on the imaginations and hearts of children and young readers everywhere, and Jenny Nimmo's Tatty Apple, Helen Cresswell's Moondial, Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden all resonate with a vital hum down the years to the reader and person I am today - three stories in particular that have become part of the landscape of my inner literary world; all three connecting - quite directly - both the real and imaginative lives of children.  Nimmo's theme of bullying in Tatty Apple is a stark counterpoint to the eponymous, gentle green rabbit;  Minty explores her growing independence and sense of self in Moondial, whilst at the same time the book paints the suffocating (and nigh-supernatural) world of a Victorian country estate; and although Joan Aiken's Armitage family may eat mundane 'Brekkfast Brikks' for breakfast, they also slip in and out of adventures involving eighteenth-century princesses, dragons and all sorts of other, quite impossible things. 

I love all of this. I love the way in which children's imaginations are properly explored in these tales. I love how the authors know exactly what it is to be a child, faced with the everyday one minute and then at the next slipping into a fantasy world of their own making. It happens all the time with so many children - you just have to watch them at their play to see this in action. 

While the range of exceptional literature for children continues to expand, I still have a real affection for books of that vintage; so I was delighted to discover the work of Ann-Marie Howell, a teller of engaging, vivid stories that echo the sensibilities of those earlier books and their writers. Her books lightly tread that same border between the real and the imaginary: you'll find ghosts that aren't ghosts, curses which turn out to have a more human than supernatural darkness, and places shadowed in mystery but now ache to see the light. The storytelling tradition is joyously celebrated in Ann-Marie's writing- we can never have enough of those kinds of story.  

I am so proud to have been asked to reveal the cover of Ann-Marie's new book, Mystery of the Night Watchers, and I genuinely cannot wait to immerse myself in the world it depicts...We may have a little while to wait until we can read that book, but I urge you (if you haven't done so already) to enjoy Ann-Marie's earlier work in the meantime. I have read The Garden of Lost Secrets three times now, alone and with my classes and - a sign of a great story, this - I keep discovering new things on each re-read. In fact, just like I do when I pick up those beloved books of my childhood. 

The Garden of Lost Secrets (2019)

Ann-Marie's first novel is a mystery-adventure set largely in the garden of a stately home. Based on Ickworth House in Suffolk, the story is very much in the mould of the classic 'garden' stories such as Moondial and Tom's Midnight Garden. It is not by chance that key scenes in all of these books happen at night, and the dusky, nocturnal atmosphere of the garden becomes almost a character in its own right. I've used this book in Year 6 and its impact on the children has been hugely well-received. 'The best thing is the mysteries,' said one boy after reading it. 'They keep you wondering all the way through...' 

 

The House of One Hundred Clocks (2020)

Following swiftly on from her debut, Ann-Marie's next book was set in Cambridge, a city very close to my own heart. This time the mystery is an impossible one to fathom from the start: a man requires a 'clockwinder' to ensure that the hundred clocks in his house never wind down, for if they do something terrible will happen. Ann-Marie's writing keeps you enthralled throughout - the almost supernatural strangeness of the clocks and their attendant 'curse' is at last revealed but - as with Garden - not before a whole other range of threads have deliciously entangled the narrative. (If you're ever in Cambridge, you might like to follow the walking tour I wrote to accompany a reading of the book: https://afewtoread.blogspot.com/2020/02/clocks-and-colleges.html) 

Mystery of the Night Watchers (2021)

Just as with her first two novels, Ann-Marie's new book published in June is based on a real-life house: this time, the Cupola House of Bury St Edmunds. In this story, the reader's imagination turns to the night sky. Here's what the publishers have to say: 

It’s May 1910 and the blazing Halley's comet is drawing closer to the earth, when Nancy is uprooted to start a new life in Suffolk with a grandfather she has never met. Nancy is forbidden from leaving her grandfather's house and discovers its secret observatory. As the mysteries begin to pile up Nancy must bring dark secrets from the past to light – even if doing so will put her own life at risk.

And now, at least one mystery about this book (just like in Ann-Marie's stories) can finally be put to bed. It's with great pride that the glorious cover of Mystery of the Night Watchers is revealed exclusively in this blog. It is the stunning artwork of Saara Katariina Soderlund with book cover design by Katherine Millichope.  

I'm certain the whole thing is going to be another hands-down winner and cannot WAIT to read it - congratulations, Ann-Marie! 

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Mystery of the Night Watchers by Ann-Marie Howell is out on 8th July 2021. Copies of the new book may be ordered from your local independent bookshop (please do support them). Blackwells, Heffers of Cambridge, or Marilyn Brocklehurst at the Norfolk Children's Book Centre, I'm sure, would all be very happy to help you.