The Museum’s Secret

This is my first foray into children’s fiction. It’s a story about a boy who goes to stay in an old tumbledown family museum for the Christmas Holidays. His mother has gone in search of his father who has disappeared on a beetle hunting expedition on the other side of the world... beetles, time travel, taxidermy and tiger hunting all feature in this first part of the trilogy of Tom Scatterhorn’s remarkable adventures. I really don’t want to say very much more about it here, except that it was thrilling to have a book published in sixteen languages and longlisted for the Cilip Prize. It’s a cliché, but it really is an amazing feeling to see your book on the shelf. Some of the covers are below.

I did some illustrations for this book, which the publisher, Liz Cross, explained would be too expensive to include, though she suggested that I might draw some masthead illustrations at the beginning of each chapter instead. I made these using pen and ink at a 1:1 scale and they became a trademark of the series — they are also dotted all over this website! If you are interested in the inspirations behind the series, click here.