Giveaway competition: Design a kit for the Stupendous Sports team!

Giveaway competition: Design a kit for the Stupendous Sports team!

To celebrate the launch of Fantastic Football on August 11th we’re launching a giveaway competition. Join us and design a kit for the Stupendous Sports team and win a copy of Fantastic Football with a fun World Cup planner, as well as the signed football used for the record-breaking charity penalty shootout at 2000m altitude! You can find out more about the shootout here.

Download the printable below and design your kit for the Stupendous Sports team! You can make it for the mens’ or women’s team and use your favourite colours. Share the finished product with us on Twitter – don’t forget to tag @fireflypress and use the hashtags #FantasticFootball and #SSFootballGiveaway!

Winner announced on Monday September 12th!

IBW Guest Blog: 48 Hours in Booka Bookshop: the Drama, the Excitement, the Hard Graft

IBW Guest Blog: 48 Hours in Booka Bookshop: the Drama, the Excitement, the Hard Graft

It’s Independent Bookshop Week! We’re here to celebrate with a fantastic guest post from Carrie, bookseller and owner of Booka Bookshop in Oswestry.


Life as a Bookseller is never dull and no two days are ever the same. The variety and versatility of what we do is part of why we do it, but I don’t know whether the sheer physicality of the role is
understood until people experience it. Here is a snapshot of one of the most enjoyable but hectic 48 hours in the life of the bookshop.

Tuesday am – a huge box arrives. It’s as tall as I am and very wide. I think one of our special guests for tomorrow’s children’s event has arrived. Hmmm! Where to put it? Thank goodness we took on
that extra floor of retail in 2017 – otherwise we would be in trouble.

Tuesday pm – start preparing for our book signing with Julia Donaldson – the books have been ordered, the format and schedule are set. We need to move tables while the shop is quiet and that involves taking books off tables first and boxing them up. Booka is large and our space is very adaptable so…. time to flex those bookseller muscles and feel the burn! It’s a little bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle or giant Jenga – we have large pieces of furniture to move to ensure that the 400 customers (families with lots of small people) who have booked in to the four sessions to meet Julia, The Gruffalo and get their books signed can queue safely and comfortably.

Disaster Strikes! Our Gardners Books delivery doesn’t arrive, therefore we are missing some of the books that people who can’t make the signing have pre-ordered. Fortunately, Gardners (our book wholesaler) are amazing and quickly find out why and what has happened. They give us assurance that they will be delivered before 12 noon tomorrow. RELAX!!!

Tuesday evening – Start the bakes for our Coffee Morning for Ukraine on Thursday. Ideally, we would do this on Wednesday evening, but we have an event.

Wednesday am – Didn’t sleep very well last night, feeling nervous about today’s event with Julia. There are a lot of elements to coordinate, and we want to make sure that everyone has a good time: our customers, Julia and her husband, our Team and of course The Gruffalo. Into the shop for 8 am, so that I am ready when the team arrive at 9 am to go through the day and make sure everyone
knows their role in making everything run smoothly. We are all excited and we chat it through together and fine tune any key decisions. Imi goes through checking the orders for each session and
the pre-orders. They were all bagged, labelled and checked on Monday but we like to check and double check.

We have lots of elements to juggle today and it’s always an unknown no matter how prepared we think we are. Our mantra is ‘Assume Nothing, Expect Anything, Anticipate Everything’. When Julia arrives, we need her to sign pre-orders, then she will begin her first session at 3pm. It has started to rain outside so I am worried that we may have families queueing in the rain if some arrive early for their sessions!

Thinking forward to our evening event, I call Tim. He is at home preparing his interview questions for our event with Anna Jones who will be chatting about her new book ‘Divide’. We have a full-house of 50 people as Anna is an Oswestry girl and this is her first event. We want to make sure she and her family, friends have a memorable evening. Tim buys wine (ready for tonight) and chocolates so that we can offer a sweet treat to families waiting to see Julia, if needed (or are they just for him!!)

Wednesday pm – We begin lunches early so that we have all the team on the shop floor when Julia arrives. A phone call, she is coming earlier – brilliant news. It means we can get the pre-orders done and out of the way. We also have a small group of students from The Derwen College coming to meet her.

3 pm – Let the proceedings commence: Ruth and Imi are meeting and greeting everyone and handing them their books, Amy is chaperoning The Gruffalo and making sure he is on his best behaviour, Tim is on tills, Jess is doing post-it dedications on books, I am opening books and passing these to Julia so that she can sign and chat to families and pose for a quick photo. Julia’s husband Malcolm arrives shortly before we start with his guitar and throughout the signing sessions, plays his guitar to calm and entertain small people along with The Gruffalo.

It’s a lovely experience. Our planning and organisation have paid off. Families arrive on time for their session and get to see Julia without too much waiting around. There is laughter, excitement, over- excitement and a feeling that we have all been part of something rather magical. Julia’s stamina is incredible. She is so passionate about language and words and has an amazing memory of when she visited us previously. She keeps post-it notes of any unusual names or names with unusual spellings. She is always thinking about her next story.

We finish early at 5.25 pm and end with a Team photo – we all have cheery grins and shiny faces. Well done Team Booka.

Now for a quick turnaround to get the shop ready for evening event. Our second Book-gym session. We re-arrange tables, put out staging and chairs, create a showcase of Anna’s books, make sure we have water, wine, soft drinks and glasses organised for author and guests. Fortunately, our team of Booksellers stay and help. They are experienced, they know the ropes and it all comes together smoothly and efficiently. The Booka machine is incredible. Wednesday Evening – Anna arrives and Tim takes her up to our ‘Green Room’ – the sofa on the first floor to chat about the event format etc. Imi and Malia arrive to help me greet our audience, serve drinks and sell books.

There is a lively, happy vibe in the bookshop and Anna is incredible – passionate, knowledgeable and eloquent. The subject matter is incredibly current and thought provoking. Tim, as an ex-town
planner has really enjoyed the book and asks great questions that Anna answers effortlessly, with insight and good humour. It is a fabulous event to top off a memorable day. We leave the shop at 10.15 pm and have fried egg on toast for tea – that’s the rock n roll life we lead!

Get to bed at 11.30 pm but it’s quite hard to relax and sleep – reading always helps with this (currently a proof of ‘The Dance Tree’ by Kiran Millwood Hargrave – one of our favourites authors).

5 am Thursday morning – I am an early riser any way (which is fortunate) so I get up to finish the baking for Ukraine Coffee Morning. I am making a family favourite ‘Rhubarb and Custard Blondie’ – yum! Just one problem, the rhubarb is still in the ground in the garden. I feed the cats and then take my torch into the darkness and pull the rhubarb – you can’t get fresher than that.

The coffee morning begins at 9.30 am and we have at least an hour’s worth of work to do getting the shop back to rights, before we can open the doors. There is a raffle and a treasure hunt to organise too!

Who planned this? I did – in my defence, things happen like this all the time and we didn’t want to wait any longer to do our coffee morning as it feels really urgent and we didn’t want to clash with Comic Relief which takes place on Friday. We have a really good response to our initial promotion and we are expecting a lot of people.

We get to the shop for 8 am and Louis (our son who works in our online department) comes with us to help with the heavy lifting. We soon have the tables back where they should be, the chairs away and the cake table ready, but we still have books everywhere!

The rest of the team arrive early with their bakes and we all get to work. They are brilliant, they know what needs doing and they just get on with it. These are the times when I realise how lucky we are to work with the people we work with. It’s Malia’s day off but she travels in from Ellesmere with her cake and helps us set up the café. Ben has booked holiday but he comes in with his cake (Victoria Sponge – doesn’t last long, the customers love it), stays for a coffee and contributes a donation. Ruth and Jess are on the café, Imi has a story-time session with a local School group so organises a space upstairs, Amy helps but traps her finger in the table. It is very painful and she is shaken, but she sorts herself out and carries on. Tim is on the till, Rhiannon (who does our marketing) helps me handing out cake, taking donations, writing raffle tickets and explaining the Treasure Hunt.

We are humbled by the response we get. Our customers and community are searching for ways to contribute to Ukraine (as are we) and a coffee morning at the Bookshop is an ideal way for them to
do this. The café is full and we are able to spend time chatting with our customers over cake and coffee. It is a wonderful coming together and a really joyous morning.

In total we have raised just over £900 from the donations, the raffle and our 10% contribution from our the day’s takings. We will continue to run the Treasure Hunt over the weekend and hope that on Monday we should have raised around £1000. This money will go to the DEC’s Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.

We are all working on empty – but caffeine and goodwill get us through. It feels good to be a bookseller and it feels good to have such a giving team and community of customers. Everyone has
been so generous with their time and donations. We have all come together for a common cause and through the bookshop we have been able to do something ‘good’.

At 12 noon, we pack away the remnants of cake and start lunches. The shop goes quieter and we are able to continue putting books out and getting back to normality! We galvanise ourselves for the afternoon and come back down to earth to do the more mundane and slightly less glamorous aspect of the job (ask Imi about plunging the toilets!!). All necessary activities to keep the bookshop running smoothly: scanning in stock, phoning customers, putting new books out, creating and changing displays, paying wages, organising follow-up social media for both of yesterday’s events and looking forward to next week to see what we have coming up: two events next week, The Marmalade Diaries with Ben Aitken on Tuesday and I, Mona Lisa with Natasha Solomons on Thursday.

Thursday 5 pm – We close the doors with a sigh of relief, we giggle and chat, ‘What an amazing couple of days’. We are all ‘naturally high’ on the wonderful combination of books and people and
what they can achieve for the benefit of others.

Tomorrow, the madness and eclectic nature of what we do in the bookshop will continue. For now, we want to say a huge thank you to all our customers who have supported us this week and every
week since we have been open. We are doing what we love and we love what we do…. BUT really pleased to have the weekend off!

– Carrie, Booka Bookshop Owner

For more info about Booka, visit their website
For more info about Independent Bookshop Week, visit Books Are My Bag
Keep an eye out on Booka’s blog for a guest post from Firefly Press Publisher, Penny Thomas!

Pre-Order Giveaway for Call Me Lion

Pre-Order Giveaway for Call Me Lion

We are so excited for you all to read Call Me Lion by the fantastic Camilla Chester. So excited even that we’re doing an exclusive pre-order giveaway – and you’re automatically entered when you pre-order Call Me Lion on our website

GOODIES FOR EVERYONE WHO PRE-ORDERS!

Everyone who has pre-ordered CALL ME LION from Firefly Press will receive:

  • A fun bookmark
  • A signed bookplate
  • And the chance to win a grand prize pack! (See below)

ONE GRAND PRIZE WINNER WILL BE CHOSEN!

The randomly selected winner will receive the items above, plus a super adorable Jellycat dog plushie (pictured below) which bears a remarkable resemblance to a very important canine friend featured in Call Me Lion.

Terms and Conditions
These terms and conditions apply to the prize draw for the Call Me Lion pre-order giveaway. There will only be one winner and one prize.
The ‘Entrant’ is the person who fills in the form.

  1. Entrants must be aged 18 or over or have permission to enter from a parent or guardian to enter.
  2. No cash alternative will be offered. The Prize is non-transferable.
  3. Unsuccessful entrants will not be contacted. The decision of Firefly Press on all matters is final.
  4. The winner will be notified by telephone or email, and MUST respond by midnight within seven days of the date of contact. If a selected winner refuses the prize, another entrant will be selected at random from the remaining eligible entries within a reasonable time frame.
  5. Entry to the prize draw is conditional on acceptance of these terms and conditions, which are governed exclusively by English and Welsh Law and under the exclusive jurisdiction of the English and Welsh courts. By entering this prize draw you are deemed to have read and accepted these terms.
  6. No employee of Firefly Press can enter.
  7. The contact details you provide upon entry to the prize draw (ie. pre-ordering Call Me Lion through the Firefly Press website) will be used to contact entrants if necessary to notify the winner, and will not be shared with other companies except to the extent necessary to provide the prize. We will only use your email address and other personal information in compliance with the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (including any amended, equivalent or subsequent legislation).
Nicola Davies on the Characters in The Song that Sings Us

Nicola Davies on the Characters in The Song that Sings Us

Illustrations by Jackie Morris


My novel, The Song that Sings Us has had some lovely things said about it by reviewers and writers. I think my favourite came from Imogen Russell Williams reviewing the book for the Guardian: ‘story-telling at the most poetic scale, strange, bloody, grand and unforgettable’. Comments like this are wonderful of course, but what every writer wants is feedback from real readers. Thank you to Grace, age 11, in National Geographic magazine for saying that the book was ‘amazing in every way and so THRILLING’. As more and more readers find this story, I’m getting more lovely feedback and also lots of questions about the characters.  

So here is a bit of background for some of the main ones. I won’t describe the physical appearance of the human characters – I know how they look in my head, but it’s how they look to you as the story plays like a film in YOUR head that counts! I want you to be able to imagine yourself inside any of them, the way I put myself inside Eowyn in Lord of the Rings, but here is a little background information to help you imagine my cast!  

Toren Sisal

Toren is the mother of the three main human characters, Harlon, Ash and Xeno. At the time of the story she is still a relatively young woman, in her late thirties. She’s a little above average height I think, strong and athletic. Toren is the daughter of a retired military man and a beautiful heiress. She trained in the military herself as part of an elite force a bit like our SAS, but shortly after her training she ran away to join the eco-rebel forces fighting oil exploitation in the White Sea, my world’s equivalent of the Arctic. Toren is a warrior and gives the care of her first born daughter, Harlon, to her partner Tui, while she goes on to be a leader of a very successful and rather violent group of eco-activists, Green Thorn.

At the time of Tui’s death she is travelling back to rejoin and revitalise Green Thorn. But she discovers she is pregnant with twins and, to protect her children, she runs to the mountains to raise them in isolation giving herself a false name – Breen Avvon.

Toren isn’t naturally motherly to her three children, eldest daughter Harlon and younger twins, Ash a boy and Xeno a girl. But she tries. She loves her children with a deep, fierce passion; she cares for them, educates them, and prepares Harlon in particular to be a warrior, like her. When the time comes, something in Toren is relieved to return to the life of an activist and soldier, but this time without bloodshed… well, not much bloodshed. She does still shoot somebody in the head…  

Harlon  

At the start of the story, Harlon is in her mid-teens and has been raised by her mother to be a warrior, the protector of her younger siblings, Ash and Xeno. This has created a little separation between her and the twins. 

Harlon’s sense of responsibility for them has made her a bit stiff and fierce at times. The fact that she doesn’t have the gift of Listening (the ability to tune in to the thoughts of animals) as they do, makes her feel very different from her siblings. Sometimes she feels she is the sensible one while they are both a bit dreamy, and sometimes she feels like the stupid one because she can’t do what they do.

Harlon is strong, fit, and well trained, but doubts her abilities at first, blaming herself for things that are beyond her control. But she is more like her mother than she realises: mentally tough and resilient. Yet there is something more to Harlon than that. She is Tui’s child too, and although she lacks his talent for Listening, she has his ability to connect in another way. The song he and his friends, the humpbacked whales, have planted inside  Harlon’s brain is there waiting for the right moment. Harlon’s intelligence and bravery, her ability to analyse and then act, are ultimately what save the world.  

Xeno  

Xeno’s words pepper the story of The Song that Sings Us. She speaks in riddles but riddles that prove to have a deep meaning. Living in isolation on the mountain has allowed her family to get used to her strange, disconnected way of communicating and her eccentric behaviour. They come to accept the fact that Xeno is really more comfortable communing with birds than with humans.

But Xeno hasn’t really chosen to be this way. Her Listener power is the strongest of anyone in the story, stronger even than that of her father, Tui. So strong, in fact, that she cannot tune out the consciousness of birds. She connects with them automatically, like a radio tuned into multiple stations and perpetually on. Some of what flows into her mind she loves, but more often it leaves her overwhelmed, confused, and not really able to exert her own will or personality.

She seems vulnerable, fragile, and the character least able to take care of herself. Yet she is the one who engages most directly in conflict with the evil leader of the Automators, Doada Sisal. It is the making of her. She finds her will to resist him, and she finds a power that she thinks does not belong to her, but to the birds with whom she connects so powerfully. But she discovers at the end of the book that she is indeed powerful, and that she can be herself.

Ash

I’m often asked (or even sometimes told) which of the characters is most like me. Harlon and Toren are who I would like to be: warriors with the ability to think fast and make good decisions under pressure. Aspects of Xeno, her alienation from the world, and her struggle to make herself feel autonomous, are like me. But the human character who was easiest to write was Ash. He has a strong sense of fairness and looks at the world with clear eyes which sometimes find human behaviour strange or even ridiculous. He is the one who I used to make a commentary about some of the aspects of the Automators plans, which I find unacceptable in our world.  

Ash loves his sister Xeno as if she were a part of himself. He looks up to Harlon and his mother and is afraid when his support system is taken away. But Ash is pretty flexible, and very resilient – he can adapt to hardship very easily and find something to make him happy in the simplest of things. He has a wry, sideways sense of humour, which he soon finds he shares with the Gula.

If you ask Ash at the start of the story, when he is about 12, where he would like to spend his life, he would say, ‘here on the mountain, of course’. He would never expect to end up on the mast of a ship sailing the oceans, and absolutely loving it. He is an unexpected adventurer, who lives in the moment.  

Doada Sisal  

Doada is desperate to conceal any information in case it undermines his rise to complete power in Rumyc. He was his mother’s darling son, spoiled by her. But he had inherited the Listener talent from his father’s side of the family, something his mother would disapprove of. Throughout his childhood he conceals this talent and through that grows a desire for secrecy and control and a taste for cruelty. He sees that his greatest chance of complete control, of complete power, lies through the Automators and their rise to power. So he must rid himself of the Listener power, which he does through a hideous self experiment.

Like his mother, Doada likes beautiful things, clothes, objects, and any kind of luxury. He sees them as his right. He’s good at manipulating people but has no real relationships in his life. No one would be good enough for him and anyone who got close might find out things he would be too ashamed to reveal. Doada is vain and deluded to the point of insanity. He is the only character who I would describe visually: he looks exactly like the UK politician Jacob Rees Mogg.

The Gula  

The Gula is a wolverine, an animal with a bad reputation with humans for wanton destruction. But wolverines are just supreme survivors, incredibly tough and with a steely determination to get what they want. I did a lot of research about wolverines for another, non-fiction book, and unearthed lots of recent discoveries made through radio tagging. These studies in some ways reinforced the image of the wolverine as an indomitable survivor – one radio-tagged wolverine went straight up a 2000 foot vertical rock face in winter, in a blizzard, in the dark, because it was the shortest route to the next place it wanted to be. But they also showed that wolverines are not so solitary, that their bonds with their children are lifelong, reinforced by children visiting both mum and dad’s territories to hang out with them as adults.  

The Gula’s vision of the trail came out of research too. Many indigenous hunters, when tracking animals using sight, sound, and smell cues, plus knowledge and memory, report the trail manifesting as a golden thread that they can actually see. It isn’t hard to imagine that an animal with such acute senses and high intelligence as a wolverine might experience something similar.  

The Gula is wise, and intuitive. She trusts her senses, and what they tell her, and she trusts her brain’s ability to interpret that sensory information and give her an unshakeable direction in which to go. Having lost her own cubs, Ash becomes her cub substitute and she will never, ever give up on him. But in following Ash, she has experiences that no wolverine would normally have, and it makes her into something even more extraordinary.  

Enkalamba  

I find it incredibly moving that many people’s favourite character is Enkalamba and that her story arc moves many readers to tears. She is another character who grew out of research for other books, and from my own interest in elephants and in animal intelligence and consciousness.

Elephants, like humans, are social beings.They communicate with sound, smell, and touch, and form strong life-long bonds with family members and friends. They rely on each other and in particular on the matriarch of their group, who is the repository of knowledge. Her long life and long memory are the group’s insurance policy against drought and famine as the matriarch remembers where food and water can be found in a range of different seasons and conditions.

Studies of elephants show that they grieve over dead relatives and friends and even return to the place where a loved one died. So they are complex beings but their huge brains are arranged very differently from our own. Experiments have shown that they are very intelligent but the nature of that intelligence and the workings of their minds we can only guess at. Enkalamba finds human minds very different, and very difficult to navigate, but she is bright and very motivated to understand. Without any of her own kind left to take to she seeks communication with other beings and through that feels, ever more strongly, that all life is one kin. And I agree with her.

Skrimsli  

Everyone’s favourite tiger sea captain! Skrimsli is a hero in a striped coat. His long associations – both very bad and very good – with humans have made him into a being not quite ‘tiger’, not quite ‘human’, but entirely himself. 

I’m not going to say much about him here as I’m right in the middle of writing his backstory for the next book in the series. But he is based on a Siberian tiger, not a Bengal, so he’s a tiger whose ancestors hunted in the boreal forests of the north, and who is used to frosts and snow.  

In writing about Skrimsli I’ve thought and read quite a bit about how language influences our thinking, on the sorts of thoughts and the sorts of communication that are only possible with language. Because language is what changes Skrimsli. I’m not sure what all his story is yet but you’ll be able to read about it soon. 


Pick up a signed copy of The Song that Sings Us here!
Pick up an unsigned copy here

Letter from a very small country with big neighbours (no, not Russia)

Letter from a very small country with big neighbours (no, not Russia)

Luīze Pastore is an award-winning Latvian author whose children’s novel, Dog Town, was published by Firefly in 2018. In this new blog she writes for Firefly readers about her horror at the war in Ukraine, and what it means for the children of Latvia, which was itself part of the USSR until 1991.

My name is Luīze Pastore. I am Latvian. In the last ten years I’ve been writing stories for Latvian children and most of them have our complicated history as the background to my plots. Mostly because it is simply impossible to avoid the history if you want to write a truthful story about anything in the Latvian past.

I was born in the USSR in 1986, and I was five years old when my father left our house to join other civilians in barricades in Riga to defend the dream of maintaining our free, sovereign country. He was there with his bare hands ready to face Soviet tanks. Latvia, which had just regained independence from the Soviet Union, anticipated that the Soviet Union would attempt to regain control over the country by armed force. It is probably only now that I fully comprehend the level of bravery that these people like my father had. Watching the Ukrainian civilians lying down in front of Russian tanks is heroism worth showing to my kids.

Here in Latvia our kids are waking up in a safe place. Our country has been a member of NATO since 2004 and we are reassuring our children that this means that we are “all for one, and one for all”. There is no fear that this promise would be lost. But I am very sure that every child in this country knows that the war is very close – just across two borders – and that it affects every single one in the world. Latvian children – Latvian speaking, Russian speaking, with Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian or Estonian backgrounds are joining their parents in peaceful protests, demonstrations and concerts, helping to pack humanitarian aid supplies to donate, showing all their support to Ukraine and admiring its level of bravery no one has seen before. It’s bravery has made Ukraine the “biggest” country in the world.

My children are five and three years old, and they know that soon there will be a Ukrainian family living in our house. They are packing their best toys to give away to children that might take a refuge under our roof. They are watching photos of newborn babies in the bomb shelters in Kiev. They do not get to watch war scenes, but they see rage, tears, sadness and determination in their parents’ eyes. They are slowly comprehending their privilege in being free – one thing no child in the world should busy their brains with.

I’ve been living in a free country since I was five and never imagined that the day when I should prepare my kids for 72-hour survival mode would come. I don’t want to live in the world where my children need to know how to pack a “72 hour survival bag” and how to safely evacuate to the basement of our house in the case of air strikes. I choose a world where my kids have terrible morning tantrums over a “wrong breakfast serving” instead of freezing in silence overhearing a daily dose of adult news in the radio. I want the same thing for the Ukrainian children – to have ordinary lives with ordinary happiness and ordinary failure.

There are a great many Russian-speaking families in Latvia that have different thoughts. People are overhearing small boys playing war games, shooting their wooden pistols in favour of the Russian side. This is the result of Russian media propaganda, the terrible lie bubble. Now that the propaganda media are finally banned and cut off in Latvia, people start to open their eyes. And it will not be easy times neither for them, nor for us because the integration of the Russian-speaking population for years and years has been a failure. Our children meet in the same kindergarten, though they never meet on the same ground. Luckily this is just one part of the Russian speaking population. The rest stand for Ukraine, for democracy, for European values.

We are not a particularly religious nation. We know that praying is not enough.
But Latvians are famous for their ability to sing the enemy away. Peaceful protests may seem naïve, but they perform a significant role – they bring people from different backgrounds together in times when everything and everyone is trying to split them apart and set them against each other. The “evil president” – as my children call Putin – thrives on frightened and fragmented society; this is exactly why one of my tasks is to teach my children not to become russophobes.

They are still allowed to hate the “evil president”. Obviously.

#slavaukraine #westandwithukraine


Luīze Pastore is the author of ten children’s books, and has just won the New Horizons Bolognaragazzi Prize 2022, to be awarded at the Bologna Book Fair later this month. Her work has been translated into French, English and Estonian, and includes Dog Town (Firefly Press 2018) which was a Guardian pick and a Times Children’s Book of the Week. Luīze lives in Latvia with her young family and dog.

Libby and the Parisian Puzzle Scavenger Hunt!

Libby and the Parisian Puzzle Scavenger Hunt!

Join us as we celebrate the publication of Libby and the Parisian Puzzle by Jo Clarke with a ten-day blog tour. Follow Libby and friends through Paris and discover all about the different locations (and much, much more) in the book!

Hosted by ten fantastic bloggers, each stop on the tour has a letter hidden in the post. Find them all and the word they spell out to enter the prize draw below and be in with the chance to win a fabulous Paris-inspired prize bundle!

Terms and Conditions
These terms and conditions apply to the prize draw for the Libby and the Parisian Puzzle prize bundle. There will only be one winner and one prize.
The ‘Entrant’ is the person who fills in the form.

  1. Entrants must be aged 18 or over or have permission to enter from a parent or guardian.
  2. No cash alternative will be offered. The Prize is non-transferable.
  3. Unsuccessful entrants will not be contacted. The decision of Firefly Press on all matters is final.
  4. The winner will be notified by telephone or email, and MUST respond by midnight within seven days of the date of contact. If a selected winner refuses the prize, another entrant will be selected at random from the remaining eligible entries within a reasonable time frame.
  5. Entry to the prize draw is conditional on acceptance of these terms and conditions, which are governed exclusively by English Law and under the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts. By entering this prize draw you are deemed to have read and accepted these terms.
  6. No employee of Firefly Press can enter.
  7. The contact details you provide upon entry to the prize draw will be used to contact entrants if necessary to notify the winner, and will not be shared with other companies except to the extent necessary to provide the prize. We will only use your email address and other personal information in compliance with the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (including any amended, equivalent or subsequent legislation).
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