I'm very excited to be on the blog tour for The Others by Sarah Merrett! It's an amazing new book that involves an epic battle between extra terrestrials & an wickedly evil professor!
Below is some information about the setting of the novel, I hope you enjoy!
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Reuben has lived in the observatory all his life and has never even visited the local village, so venturing on a steam train to the big city is a huge adventure. So what was an English city like in 1902 when The Others is set? Bustling and noisy, for starters. The roads were chaotic and dangerous, full of carriages, carts, omnibuses and hand carts, with very little road safety. Motorcars where pretty rare at this stage, and remained so until the arrival of the Ford Model T in 1908.

Shopping in the city was a very different experience in 1902. People tended to shop most days as there wasn’t the means to keep food fresh, which meant city pavements were busy places. Shopping was a much more personal affair than today. People queued at the counter to be served, and polite conversation was expected. Items were weighed and wrapped or put straight into a newspaper-lined wicker basket. The array of shops on offer was of course very different to today, with things like the general fancy shop where you could buy whisker curlers, smelling salt bottles and sealing wax, or the apothecary where you could pick up some arsenic face soap or cocaine toothache drops.
Street food was big business in 1902, and the city offered things Reuben didn’t even know existed. Street food was cheap, which appealed to the poor who often had no cooking facilities of their own, so this was their only chance of hot food. You would find sellers of sheep’s trotters, pickled whelks and hot eels, and perhaps more appealingly, spice cakes and hot crumpets. And to drink? How about some asses milk, ginger beer or hot wine? Ice cream was growing in popularity and the trade relied on ice imported from Norway. The ice cream cone was a relatively new thing in 1902, and they were cup shaped rather than cones. Raspberry, peach and vanilla were typical flavours.
Most excitingly in the big city, Reuben encounters a sweet shop for the first time and is overwhelmed by the choice. There were, of course, the traditional sweets we still have today – liquorice allsorts, pear drops and fruit pastilles, for example, and these were all served in cones of twisted newspaper. You could also buy Cadbury’s chocolate and Fry’s Chocolate Cream as well as toffee and fudge, among other sweet things.
The one thing Reuben didn’t expect to encounter in the city was the network of underground waterways – rivers that once flowed aboveground, but were diverted underground to make space for more buildings as the city grew.
I found it hugely engrossing researching the historical details for The Others, but delving into the past can become a major time-sink. A fascinating one, though, and such details add richness to a story.

I'm very excited to be on the blog tour for the second installment in the Pirate Academy series! 
I've got a piece below from author Justin Somper on how living in Australia has influenced his writing, enjoy!
Australia has been a key influence on my writing of both VAMPIRATES and now PIRATE ACADEMY. I can trace this back to my first trip to Oz in 1997. I took a “hop on, hop off” bus tour up the East Coast from Sydney to Cairns. Along the way, I hopped off for a couple of days in Byron Bay. This was a memorable stay – not least for the group surfing lesson which was cut short when one of my fellow travellers cut her toe in the water and the instructor raced us all out of the water, warning that sharks might pick up the scent of her blood. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if said instructor just fancied an early lunch.
 
Another key memory of that visit to Byron was walking the path up to the lighthouse, which marks the most easterly point of Australia. It’s a stunning location and it lingered in my head. I can’t remember exactly when the idea for VAMPIRATES first came to me but it was around the late 90s/early 2000s. It took a while for the idea to settle and for me to work through all the possibilities it presented – for instance, whether to set the story in the past, present or future. Another key decision was WHERE to set it. I decided the story would at least set sail from Australia. I thought this would give the books – and heroes Grace and Connor Tempest – an exciting point of difference to the many children’s adventure series set in the UK or US. In particular, I thought the sunny environs and stunning coast of Australia would serve the story well and also give the characters an easy starting point for exciting further voyages to India and China amongst others.
 
So, as I’ve said before, I took the beautiful, boho vibe of Byron Bay and churlishly twisted it into the claustrophobic small-town that is Crescent Moon Bay. I hope/think that Byron’s residents – which now include more than one Hemsworth, I believe - have forgiven me!
 
By the time I was working on DEAD DEEP, the World Book Day adventure I wrote between TIDE OF TERROR and BLOOD CAPTAIN, I had met the man I was going to marry  – PJ, who happens to be Australian. I already had Australian characters in the story – Grace, Connor, Dexter and Bart to name a few. Now that I had PJ’s brains to pick, certain elements in the book became rather more Australian. Bart began using phrases like “feeling rough as guts” and there are references to yabbies – a species of crayfish native to Australia.
 
PJ and I had a civil partnership in London in 2011 and then “upgraded” to a beach wedding in Margaret River, Western Australia in March 2020, right on the cusp of the pandemic. His influence, firstly on VAMPS and now on PIRATE ACADEMY has been huge. I often work through knots in the plot with him. With PIRATE ACADEMY 2: MISSING AT SEA, I was working on the last chapters and realised that, despite my planning, they were just falling short and lacking the end-of-book punch. A walk and talk with PJ around our local park – Hyde Park – resolved that and I came back to my desk with a strong new plot twist.
 
This Hyde Park isn’t the one in London but here in Perth, the city on the far west of Australia, where I am writing this. We moved over in late 2022 for family reasons and have termed this our “big open-ended adventure”. I came over with the UCLan contract for the first three PIRATE ACADEMY books but I didn’t actually start writing them until we got here.
 
Living and writing here in Australia has influenced the PIRATE ACADEMY books in a number of helpful ways. All the time I was writing VAMPIRATES, I was based in land-locked London. Now it’s a mere thirty-minute drive to the coast, whenever I need the inspiration of crashing waves. There are striking lighthouses all along the beautiful WA coast and, on our travels back to beautiful Margaret River, we’ve visited the historic lighthouses at Cape Naturaliste and Cape Leeuwin. The Cape Leeuwin lighthouse stands at the most South-Westerly corner of the continent and marks the meeting point between the Southern and Indian Oceans. How romantic is that?!
 
Like I say, Perth itself is in easy striking distance to the Indian Ocean. But even closer, cutting through the city’s heart, is the vast Swan River, which in parts is teeming with sailing vessels. About six months into our sojourn here, I seized the opportunity to take sailing lessons at Royal Perth Yacht Club. After twenty years of writing about ships and sailing, some first-hand education seemed overdue!
 
The beginners’ sailing course gave me an excellent grounding in the basics, which I was able to swiftly bring to bear in the first PA book, NEW KID ON DECK. But although it was useful to know how to trim a sail or helm a keelboat, and the difference between tacking and gybing, it was the visceral experience of sailing that was most useful to me as a writer. It’s the feel of being out on the water, in all conditions, that I want to capture and convey. After seven weeks on the water, I had a good sense of what it’s like to be out in different weather, ranging from sun and almost no wind (almost impossible to get moving) through to pelting rain and driving winds (an adrenaline ride that you still feel hours after reaching land and getting dry). These experiences were invaluable when it came to writing MISSING AT SEA, where the Barracudas embark on their Oceans Bound weekend – sailing independently for the first time in their career at Pirate Academy.
 
In MISSING AT SEA, my young heroes Jasmine, Jacoby and Neo come up close with snakes, spiders, sharks and the searing heat, amongst other challenges. It was noticeable to me how much easier it was to conjure up all these now that I’m living and writing Down Under. I’m intrigued to see how my adopted country makes its presence felt as the story continues!