But you said it would be in the Summer?!

What heinous lies you tell!

I know, I apologise – to be fair it has still been quite hot here, so it’s kind of summer in spirit. Also, life has a way of getting in the way and things happen and then months have gone shooting by along with your deadlines.

So here we are, eagerly anticipating the onset of autumn, and it brings with it GRIND SPARK LAUNCH NEWS.

Here ye, here ye!

*Leaves rustle*

Grind Spark be on its way!

*Bells ring out*

And it shall be released from its shackles!

*Kicks leaves about, feels something soft and sticky underneath the tree finger corpses, pretends that never happened*

And the day shall be October 31^st of this fine year of 2016!

Yes, fiends, it shall be the very day that Halloween is to occur on.

There you have it.

It’s set.

Mark your diaries.

But what is Grind Spark?

Longlisted for the Bath Novel Award 2014, Grind Spark is a near-future dystopian novel about growing up in the years leading up to the end of the world. It’s about pretending to be the perfect family. It’s about whether you want to survive.

COMMENCE BLURBAGE:

What do you do when the earth is dying?

You party like it’s the end of the world.

Deek never had any choice; designed and born in a lab and bought by the Prefin family, her job is to be the perfect daughter.

And in eight years she is going to die.

Along with the rest of the human race.

Bound by contract, Deek must spend the few years she has playing at happy families, while her mother treats her as an accessory, her brother hates her and her grandmother uses her to score social media points.

And as the Prefins disintegrate under the pressures to enjoy life before the scheduled apocalypse, and their selfishness and cruelty become more extreme, Deek finds support in an online friend. But can he show her what it’s like to care, what it’s like to hope?

If you see the darkest sides of the human family, would you want to survive the end of the world?