I could not be happier in seeing Alston Moor out in world! I am immensely grateful to the team at Goldsmiths Press and its imprint Gold SF, particularly Una McCormack and Paul March-Russell.

I began my preparatory work for this novel in January 2021 after months of mulling over how I could write a novel set on moors and peatbogs!

A moorland landscape was the literal backdrop to my childhood in Bolton, a large Lancashire town dominated, back then, by the chimneys of cotton mills. It lies in the foothills of the West Pennines — bleak and expansive, replete with blanket bogs and peaty pools, and prone to wildfires.

Later, I learned about the importance of peatbogs as carbon sinks and about their degradation over the centuries by drainage projects and industrial pollution. And then, having taken up birdwatching during the first year of the Covid pandemic, I became increasingly aware of the persecution of raptors on moorland shooting estates across the UK.

So, I started reading and talking to peatland specialists, and visiting restoration projects, and finally after two research visits to the North Pennines, I chose Alston Moor as the setting for my novel. I sketched out my main characters, decided on a fractured structure with two parallel storylines and multiple voices. Finally, in October 2021, I drafted the first chapter.

I think this a good point to add the publisher’s description:

In an epic novel set on the North Pennine Moors, Elizabeth has abandoned avalanche science to restore desolate peatlands. She treks in the footsteps of Isabel who, five centuries earlier, herds her cattle to remote summering grounds.

Both are reeling from the overwhelming crises of their day. In 1548, Isabel and her father, together with the priest in this poorest of parishes, grapple with the chaos of the Protestant Reformation. Today, a grieving Elizabeth fights to save an invaluable ecosystem, one that is threatened by wilful fire-raising and arson.

The entwined stories are told through multiple voices creating a rich portrait of England’s most remote landscape. At its heart, this deeply moving novel interrogates how society confronts crisis whether through science, faith or superstition.

Anyone who has read my previous fiction will notice that Alston Moor represents a side-step. My four previous novels stand together as near-future speculative or science fiction. But this latest novel is a work of eco-fiction set in the present day and in the Medieval period allowing the reader to glean what has been lost in terms of the richness and diversity of peatland ecosystems.

This dual-storyline structure has allowed me to address the problematic issue of ‘baseline shift’, by which each generation recognises only those environmental changes that have occurred in their own lifetime. Despite my side-step, all my writing to date has centred on some area of scientific endeavour, often with reference to our unfolding climate catastrophe.

There are, in fact, symmetries in writing historical and future-based fiction. I experienced this when writing my second novel Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, which comprised three storylines including one set in Renaissance Florence. To my mind, the past can sometimes feel as unreachable and unknowable as the future. Fiction can fill the gaps, and this is where the challenge and the fun lies. I enjoyed every minute of my long period of historical research for Alston Moor.

My first opportunity to talk in public about Alston Moor will be in an interview with author and critic Nina Allan at Bute Museum on 12 September. See here for upcoming events, which I will keep updated. I am a member of Bute Museum and Natural History Group, and I have learned so much about this beautiful island, my home for the past 8+ years, both through the BMNHG and the Bute Bird Group. It’s a fitting venue!

Many thanks to all those early reviewers and endorsers of Alston Moor, and my thanks as always to the readers who have supported my fiction. If you are wondering whether to read Alston Moor, maybe these endorsements by Sandra Newman, Martin MacInnes, Aliya Whiteley and James Bradley will persuade you.

Happy reading, everyone!