The situation for Africa’s vultures is bleak – but it’s not too late… (Photo: Estitxu Martinez de Albeniz)

I thought I’d share an article that I wrote for the September 2015 edition of BirdLife International’s World Birdwatch magazine, which highlights the grave threat these magnificent birds of prey are facing.

To read a PDF of the article (500 KB), please click here.

To help, please visit: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/africanvultures

The interview I did about The Listeners with Mark Bond-Webster of Future Radio is now available online.

Click here to listen to the interview.

Thanks to my friends Simon Brooke and Clive Dunn (who also took the novel’s wonderful cover photo), I now have a trailer for ‘The Listeners’, which I think perfectly captures the atmosphere of the book.

I helped Clive to film it in an abandoned house in the heart of the Norfolk countryside, so the setting is certainly authentic. Simon then very kindly edited and made a story out of our rambling rushes.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it and thanks again to Simon and Clive. If you ever need some graphics made, videos edited, or photography or video taken, then check out their websites.

Click here to view the trailer on YouTube.

In good company on the shelves at Toppings, Ely

Signed paperback copies of ‘The Listeners’ are now available in more bookshops around East Anglia. The latest stockists include the wonderful Toppings Books in Ely, Bookmark in Spalding (thanks to Christine and Sam for organising my event there last week – and to everyone who came!), Crabpot Books in Wells and Cley, NWT Cley Marshes visitor centre, Ceres Books in Swaffham, the Holt Bookshop, and Waterstones King’s Lynn.

Thanks to all for their help and support, as well as to my other local stockists: Kett’s Books in Wymondham, The Book Hive, Jarrolds Book Department and Waterstones in Norwich city centre, and Waterstones UEA.

Nature writer Mark Cocker wrote a wonderful two-page feature on The Listeners in last Saturday’s EDP Weekend.

I particularly enjoyed his description of John Abrehart, the character who strides through the centre of the novel (though we never get to hear from him directly due to his untimely demise before the novel begins):

“This centrally absent figure, John Abrehart, is evoked piecemeal by his offspring as a crudely vigorous muscleman, who is at once a war hero and a sensitive country labourer steeped in rural mythology and the elemental life of the fields, but he is also morally flawed.”

As the EDP don’t always digitise their Weekend features I’m including a pdf link of the article (877 KB) here for anyone who’d like to read it in full. And many thanks to Mark for the wonderful write-up!

The well-respected UK book site The Bookbag recently reviewed ‘The Listeners’. Thanks to Luke Marlowe for such a great write-up.

Click here to read their review.

Autumn leaves

No, this isn’t a late reference to NCFC’s dismal defeat on Saturday, but a reminder that I’m reading tonight from ‘The Listeners’ (and signing copies) as part of Writers’ Centre Norwich’s Christmas Party at Norwich Arts Centre (7.30pm)!

Hopefully see some of you later.

Big skies at Cley nature reserve.

When people think of Norfolk and its wildlife, their first thoughts are likely to drift towards the stunning open spaces of the coast, with their huge flocks of wintering geese and great gathering of waders. Or perhaps the vast reedbeds of the Broads, with their swallowtail butterflies and booming bitterns, spring to mind.

However, it wasn’t these impressive big-sky spectacles that first drew me, but instead the woodlands and gently undulating fields of central Norfolk, a landscape imprinted indelibly on my childhood. My grandmother lived all her life in a small village between Swaffham and King’s Lynn and, when we used to visit, the surrounding woods, meadows, glass-clear chalk streams and hollow-pocketed commons were a magical contrast to the flat Fenland horizons in which I grew up.

The woods were dark and dense, criss-crossed with half-remembered paths and tracks, thick swathes of nettles which we would have to hack back, and rickety planks that straddled narrow becks. Once, walking home at dusk, a friend and I watched a barn owl quarter the meadow, before landing nonchalantly in front of us on a fence post.

So when I got a place on the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA, I suppose it wasn’t a surprise that these same woods and their wildlife should come to form such an important part of my novel, The Listeners, which is set in Norfolk at the start of the Second World War and features a nature-loving boy, William Abrehart, at its centre.

To help research the book I began to explore Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s lesser-known reserves, places that had an instant familiarity, replete with the same sense of magic I had felt in childhood. One of the first was NWT Wayland Wood on the outskirts of Watton. Initially drawn there by the presence of gaudy, introduced golden pheasants, I soon found myself coming under the spell of the place. Walking its rides in the late afternoon it was easy to get caught up in the atmosphere that seemed to linger about the trees, and to begin to believe that the events of the ‘Babes in the Woods’ legend really did occur among the wood’s thick cover. (I never have managed to see any of its golden pheasants, just occasionally heard their odd, piercing calls from somewhere off in the distance.)

Bluebells in Wymondham Cemetery

NWT Lower Wood, Ashwellthorpe, a few miles from my home in Wymondham, is now also a firm favourite, particularly in spring when the air is heavy with the scent of wild garlic and the understorey carpeted with bluebells. The colours of these iconic flowers are chameleon-like: violet beneath the deepest shade, yet silvery lilac where the sun sneaks through the green gaps above. A walk there this Easter was enriched by the appearance of numerous early purple orchids, which emerged in path-side pockets, their vivid flowers pointing skywards in cone-shaped clusters. A sunny afternoon several weeks later and they had vanished, though various butterflies flitted along the tracks and blackcaps bubbled, unseen, from the depths of the trees.

Comma butterfly

NWT Narborough Railway Line, is a disused railway embankment renowned for its wildflowers and butterflies. As well as the dingy and grizzled skippers of its chalk grassland, the reserve can be a surprisingly good place for woodland birds: a few years back it gave me my last Norfolk sighting of nightingale (sadly, this sub-Saharan migrant is declining across the UK and is probably no longer present at the site). A confiding individual piped its song from the edge of a hawthorn bush, perched in the open so that I could study how the russet of its tail contrasted with the rest of its plainer-brown upperparts. This was a species I had never managed to see growing up, though they would have been relatively common in the woods around my grandmother’s house then – I can still recall looking for them without reward – so finally seeing one just down the road brought things full circle.

If you do get the chance, it is well worth finding the time to visit these unfamiliar corners of the county’s interior. To me they are places loaded with possibility and mystery, a sense added to by local tales of German bombers which may (or may not) have been shot down nearby, or of bottomless pits in the woods that belong to the Devil… They are also, of course, havens for wildlife, and a wonderful way for people to connect with the Norfolk landscape and its history.

(A version of this article is published in the Winter 2014 edition of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s members’ magazine Tern.)

Finally getting round to setting up a website in anticipation of the upcoming launch of my first novel, ‘The Listeners’.

More details and some proper blogging to follow soon! Just trying to get my head around WordPress at the moment…