Kate Thompson is one of the most exciting authors writing for young people today for she is a born storyteller, highly original and thought provoking in her ideas. She has travelled widely in the USA and India and studied law in London. After living in County Clare, she moved to Kinvara in County Galway and it was there that she discovered her passion for playing the fiddle. She is now an accomplished player and also has a great interest in restoring instruments. Kate is the only author to win the Children's Books Ireland Bisto Book of the Year award four times - in 2002 for The Beguilers, in 2003 for The Alchemist's Apprentice, in 2004 for Annan Water and in 2006 for The New Policeman. The New Policeman also won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize 2005, the Whitbread Book Award Children's category 2005, the Children's Book of the Year in the Irish Book Awards in March 2006 and has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. In March 2008 another of Kate's books, The Last of the High Kings, was shortlisted for the 2008 Children's Books Ireland Bisto Award, and Creature of the Night was longlisted for the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize.
This is a lovely book, with fine line drawings, the sort you'd be happy to see a boy of eight reading, and I hope it is the beginning of a series -- Toby Clements Daily Telegraph Told in beautiful clear prose, this short novel does not try to emulate the historical fiction published in the Antelope and Gazelle series of 1960s-1980s by such authors as Rosemary Sutcliff, but gives the reader a glimpse of a past era in a different, humorous way -- Janet Fisher Books for Keeps