Lydia Syson

I’ve been having a lot of fun and also a little anguish this week choosing my ten favourite historical novels for young readers for the Guardian Children’s Book Website.  Do visit the site to find out more. These lists are inevitably distinctly personal, and of course I’d love to know what you think of my choices.  Well, that’s as long as you love the books as much as I keep reading

When I made the decision to write A World Between Us entirely from the perspectives of the three main characters, interweaving the close third-person narratives of Felix, Nat and George, it solved some problems and created others.  The chaos of war, combined with the effects of propaganda keep reading

A quick round-up this week…

Everything is coming together on the multi-touch iBook edition of A World Between Us and it’s looking simply amazing… I’ve certainly been amazed every time Amy Orringer (Digital Co-ordinator at Hot Key Books) has sent me the latest version, with more pages and ‘assets’ to check through and approve.

It’s quite hard to picture until you see it in keep reading

‘There are loads of histories that deserve remembering’ wrote Catherine Johnson this week on The History Girls blogspot, on the subject of Black History Month.  What better time to remember a few more?  Until I started work on A World Between Us, I had no idea of the roles played by black volunteers and conscripts in the Spanish Civil War – volunteers on the Republican side, Moroccan conscripts fighting for Franco.  Histories within histories. keep reading

Last Christmas I handed over present-buying duties to a reponsible other and buckled down to re-writes. By early January Hot Key had sent me a cover design.

I opened the attachment with great excitement, desperate to love it. keep reading

Cameron Jacobs and Iris Mathieson performing Si tu me quieres escribir (If you want to write to me…), a song to celebrate the launch of A World Between Us into the reading world.  I’ve started spotting that cover in bookshop windows already.

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75 years ago today my grandmother was arrested.  It must have been incredibly frightening, but by then she was used to being on the frontline. Maire Lynd (later Gaster) was one of 111 people ‘knocked off’ (as my grandfather put it) at a huge anti-fascist demonstration in Bermondsey.  Dockworkers, Communists, ILP members and Trades Councils got together to defeat Mosley’s Blackshirts as they tried to penetrate a Labour stronghold in the heart of London. keep reading

Like most writers, I find pictures often help the words along. Some images get under your skin more than others. I can’t pretend that A World Between Us started with this beautiful print. But its appearance in my life felt serendipitous, and I’ve loved living with it for the last few years.

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