Catriona Child – författare

It’s 1994, Kurt Cobain has just died, and teenager Alex is spending the summer working in her Aunt’s Bed and Breakfast in rural Argyll. The village pace of life is slow compared to home in Edinburgh and Alex resigns herself to a quiet summer spent serving breakfasts and making beds. Everything changes however once she meets the twin brothers who live next door.Spanning the next fifteen years of Alex’s life, Fade Into You is a love letter to growing up in Scotland in the 90s and 2000s. Set against a backdrop of T in the Park and the war in Iraq, soundtracked by Britpop and Grunge mixtapes, with the sweet taste of tablet, it is a novel about growing up and growing apart. It explores the intensity of childhood friendships, how they change as we get older but how they never really leave us.

Davie was about to leave the MP3 player lying on the pavement when something stopped him. A voice in his head.You'll regret it if you leave it. You'll only come back for it later.Can a song change your life?Can a song bring people, places and moments in time alive again?Davie Watts is the Trackman. He knows what song to play to you and he knows exactly when you need to hear it. Davie seeks out strangers in need and helps them using the power of music.

Swim Until You Can’t See Land charts the relationship between two women born sixty years apart, whose chance encounter marks a watershed for the younger woman.In her early twenties, Hannah Wright is forced to give up a promising career as a professional swimmer, and is adjusting with difficulty to her narrowed horizons. She is in danger of becoming embittered, haunted by a lost future.Mariele may now be frail and old, but as her exploits during WW2 unfold, she is revealed as a woman of extraordinary spirit, unbroken by capture and interrogation as an agent in occupied France. Hannah’s delight in the medium of water and the rhythms of swimming are set in dramatic counterpoint to Mariele’s of torture by water, an ordeal that puts her in touch with her core strength – something Hannah starts to discover in herself.

'I guess we've always preferred hiding away than sharing our problems. Us versus the world.'When Sam is woken in the middle of the night by the sound of his mother crying, he is reluctant to get up and discover the reason for her distress. When he finally discovers what has happened, even his worst fears cannot compare to the truth, and he realises that both their lives have now changed irrevocably.Sam and Jude struggle to cope with their shock and grief and are powerless to stop their family home descending from a place of refuge into one of dread and danger. As their world begins to resemble a horror movie, events from the past surface once more bringing with them painful memories of betrayal and public shaming.Can Sam and Jude recover from the trauma of what has happened or have their lives been devastated forever? Do they share their secret with the outside world, or do they retreat into a life of seclusion and fear? And is either one of them brave enough to make the ultimate sacrifice, for the sake of their family and potentially the rest of the world…?