An extraordinary story about friendship and betrayal. Of revenge and retribution but also redemption. Perfect for 11+ readers who enjoy Stranger Things.
Hex never meant for the girl to follow him and his friend Tommo into the woods. He never meant for her to fall off the rope swing and break her arm. When the finger of blame is pointed at him, Hex runs deep into the woods and his fierce sense of injustice leads him to a strange clearing in the woods – a clearing that has never been there before – where an old lady in a cottage offers him a deal. She’ll rid the world of those who wronged him and Hex can carry on his life with them all forgotten and as if nothing ever happened. But what Hex doesn’t know is someone else has been offered the same deal.When Hex’s best friend Tommo wakes up the next day, he is in a completely different world but he only has murmurs of memories of the world before. Moments of deja vu that feel like Tommo’s lived this day before. Can Tommo put the world right again? Back to how it was? Or can he find a way to make a new world that could be better for them all?
Bloomsbury Children’s Books
The Song From Somewhere Else is a truly beautiful book, in all senses of the word, so when I saw that A.F. was writing another story set in that world also illustrated by Levi Pinfold I was a mixture of “YES PLEASE” and “how can it possibly compare…”. I needn’t have worried though. The Worlds We Leave Behind is completely different but equally enthralling. I asked A.F. Harrold a few questions:
The Worlds We Leave Behind is wonderfully philosophical. I love how you don’t talk down to young readers while also pitching it so as to not go over their heads, do you ever have ideas that you think are too complicated to include in a children’s book?
I imagine there probably are ideas ‘too complicated’ for a kids book, but, much more importantly, there are a million ideas that are perfect. And some of them might look complicated, until you begin to think about them.
I think about the science ideas a writer like Christopher Edge builds his stories around, or Dom Conlon’s Meet Matilda Rocket Builder – perfect books with big complicated ideas behind them. Of course, those are scientific/engineering ideas, and your question began with a thought about philosophy, but I think it’s much the same, and of course, the scientific explanations throw up ethical and psychological questions. Take Chris’s The Many Worlds of Albie Bright – it shows how quantum physics, alternate universes and ethics are all intertwined, and does it with heart and love.
It’s important to remember that we swim in a soup, where none of these subjects and ideas are separate, it’s all mixed up together and you can’t look at one ingredient without bumping into another.
Did you know before you started writing TWWLB that it would be one for Levi Pinfold to illustrate?
Yes. It took a long time for me to find out what I could write next, and the key turned and the spark ignited the moment I realised I could just take a character from our previous book together (The Song from Somewhere Else) and continue their story. And so, since it was continuing that world we’d already spent time in, I wrote it with Levi in mind. That isn’t the same as knowing your publisher will agree to let Levi illustrate it when you hand the story in, however. We were fortunate, though, that my editor, Zöe Griffiths, agreed with me that it ought to be Levi. And even more fortunately, when they approached Levi, he said yes, I think without having actually read it, because we didn’t have a final draft at that point.
Because Levi is such an amazing and in demand illustrator, we knew we had to wait a while before The Worlds We Leave Behind would reach his desk, so Zöe and I were able to work on the story and the text for two years before it reached the final final state. After the first year (draft 3) the story was pretty much what’s in the book, and Levi was in the UK for a rare visit (he lives in Australia), and he came over to my house one afternoon, and we sat in my shed (office at the end of the garden), and I was able to sit with him and tell him the story as we drank tea and looked out at the bare trees. I enjoyed that very much, because he is so delightful a person, so engaged and so talented. He’s about ten years younger than me, but our growing up experiences, in small English towns, kicking around down the rec, were similar enough that we seem to fit together well, and he understands what I’m on about. And then, after that storytelling session, he flew back to Australia and within a couple of weeks the first lockdown was announced and our world changed forever. Zöe and I finessed the 4th draft, the final version, into shape over that summer (while also seeing me and Mini Grey’s The Book of Not Entirely Useful Advice to press – a quite different adventure), and it was only the following February (2021) that Levi got to read it (having heard it almost exactly a year before).
It was a long process, but it gave everything time to settle into place, all the words, all the action and then, finally, all the pictures.
How soon in the draft process did you get him involved? Did you note what scenes you would like to have illustrated or leave it entirely up to him?
So, as you see from the previous answer, he wasn’t actually involved (as in drawing), until the writing was all done, but that is misleading, because he was involved from the moment I hit the first key on the keyboard and wrote the word ‘Hex’ at the top of the page. (My works in progress are usually just named for the character, titles are a pain in the bum to be thought about years down the line!) Having done The Song From Somewhere Else together I knew the style Levi draws this world in, I had an idea of how it looks because he’s already shown that to me, and so I was able to write with the thought in my head, ‘What would I like to see Levi draw?’ and so that led us into the forest, that gave us big dogs, that gave us brooding shadows and a fairytale cottage… What would you like to see Levi draw next?
And so, when the time came for illustrating, an editor will normally give an illustrator a brief – we’d like pictures of this scene, that scene and this character, and so on (spaced out evenly through the story, one per chapter, or whatever). But with Levi (and with Emily Gravett, in the books I’ve done with them), because these are intended to be highly illustrated and because the illustrator is of such quality (and know what they’re doing and won’t be daft and draw thirty pictures for the first ten pages and nothing for the next 200!), I think we’re much more inclined to just let them go and do what they want.
Of course, the process involves roughs and we might make suggestions at that stage, nudging things this way or that, and we get a feel for the shape of it and ask for scenes that have been missed and so on. And then you get the great joy of seeing final art come in, and then I’m able to do little edits in the text to match the things Levi’s drawn better (Hex in jeans, rather than shorts, for example), and I couldn’t be happier seeing what my little words inspired from his magnificent fingers! Gosh but he’s a master.
Do you have different routines when writing a novel vs poetry, or humour vs atmosphere? Do you favour one over the other?
When I’m working on a (first draft of a) novel, I do try to do something every day. I discovered for this one that getting up very early and writing before going for my daily walk, before looking at e-mails or the internet, was the way to go. I’d come down to my shed, through the silent sunlit morning (it was April/May 2019, and beautiful), put on Morton Feldman’s Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello and spend some time with Hex and Tommo and the others, and then I can get on with my day. And if I’ve done that, made that early start, I can usually return to the manuscript during the day and do some more.
If, on the other hand, I have let the world step in front first (opened an e-mail, written an invoice…) then I’ll never be able to settle to writing that day. (Editing and rewriting, that’s easy to dip in and out of, but writing new stuff… that’s hard and fickle.) Poems, on the other hand, because of their snackability, they’re much easier to sit down and have a go at at any time. Part of the joy is, of course, that if it doesn’t work you can throw it away and you’ve only lost half an hour, and if it did work… brilliant, you’ve got a new thing in your hand and in your head, that didn’t exist before! There’s a lot less pressure on any individual poem to be good, and so it’s much easier to simply give it a go.
What kind of events do you most enjoy doing?
I like performing poems and being funny. Comedy for kids without the safety net.
What are you reading at the moment and who would you recommend it to?
I’ve just read Gareth P Jones’ No True Echo (2015) (which I read about in a review of TWWLB), a great mind-bending alternative world time travel looping story, for (I guess) maybe 11+ with a good grip on what’s real. Then I read Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (1977), which I’d seen the movie of, but had never read, and it was as moving and heart-sinking as I expected, and typically and nostalgically American – it’s not my culture, not my world, but it’s so familiar from TV and films – which I’d recommend for anyone with a heart who yearns for freedom. And I’ve just finished Wolfstongue by Sam Thompson and illustrated by Anna Tromop (2021), which is your perfectly normal boy-meets-talking-wolf-and-rescues-it-from-the-talking-foxes-and-finds-his-life’s-turned-upside-down-and-he’s-involved-in-a-mythic-battle-underground sort of story, for any kid who likes that sort of thrilling adventure.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve written a sort of creepy ghost story story, which I’m waiting to hear if my publisher likes enough to publish. Fingers crossed.
Thank you to Nina Douglas for organising a review copy and the opportunity for a Q&A with A.F. Harrold. THE WORLDS WE LEAVE BEHIND was published by Bloomsbury Children’s Books on 4 August (9781526623881/ £12.99 hardback).