The Bird Yard (A New English Library Paperback) - Softcover

"Well constructed, beautifully written. It will definitely rank among the best crime books of the year." - Yorkshire Post

"A nail-biting thriller...a remarkably mature novel." - Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News

"Immaculately crafted, chilling and...compulsively readable." - Cambridge Evening News

"This author's career [is] going much the same way as [Minette] Walters'." - The Bookseller

Thanks for showing an interest in this book. It started out as a screenplay but I wrote it as a novel after Hodder & Stoughton published 'A Likeness in Stone' and asked me for an outline of my next novel. I was so steeped in the screenplay which, at the time, was called 'Roly's Yard', that I couldn't focus on anything else, so I really had no option but to write it as a novel. Besides, the subject matter was deemed too disturbing for mainstream tv and I was beginning to think it would never be made. Therefore, the decision was made for me in a way.

Even so, it was a rocky ride. No sooner had I finished the novel that my agent got a call from my editor at Hodder to say that the company wouldn't be publishing anything that touched on paedophilia, and that included my novel 'for which they'd paid an advance but had yet to see a draft'. My agent told them the novel was finished, and the least they could do was read it, which they did. Once they were assured that there was nothing graphically violent in the novel, and that the reader didn't actually 'see' what had happened to the children but that this was left to the reader's imagination, they published it, but not without reservations.

I'm relieved to say the novel was well-received by reviewers and public alike, and I hope you enjoy it. Email me (I'm not allowed to give you my website address or email here but you'll find my website on most search engines) and good or bad - let me know what you thought of it. All the best, Julia