Angel

US Cover

Two girls are inextricably linked by destiny, not choice.

Stephanie is friendless, strange, a misfit.

Freya can't stop seeing angels. 

But when one of those angels begins to stalk her, its shadow following her everywhere, Freya is forced to make decisions from which there is no turning back.

Angel is my first novel written explicitly with a teenage audience in mind. I've even flirted with romance — a first for me. I think I've always been interested in the concept of angels (who wouldn't want to have their own guardian angel?).

But I didn't want to write about religious angels, commanded by the will of God. Interesting as that notion is, it's been done endlessly. What I wanted was a deeply spiritual being, but secular.

UK Cover

And I thought it would be interesting to have a girl who exists betwixt the angelic world and our own: half human and half angel. There would be advantages (she can fly, for a start) but what about the disadvantages? What about all those people as an angel she's meant to care for? What if it is too hard? What if she wants to give up? Can she? How can she possibly live up to the expectations of the angels when she has her own human problems to deal with?

The notion of the dark angel/light angel contrast — one apparently malevolent, the other a classic altruistic angel — came to me early. I wanted to play with these notions.

I thought that a real human being would lie somewhere between them as well. I tried to make Freya, my main character, reflect those human qualities: a decent person, but as selfish as the rest of us; wanting to do the right thing, but afraid of making mistakes and endangering herself.

In the end, this story became a kind of moral fable about my view on the right way to behave in the world. I didn't mean it to, but books sometimes take on a strange life of their own.