About the author… Gareth Brown

He lives near Edinburgh in Scotland and for 20 years has worked as a civil servant. He has been writing in his spare time since he was a teenager. This is his first novel.

The novel was inspired by… My love of travelling. During the Covid lockdowns, when I was confined to home for many months, I really missed the joy of discovering new places. I craved to return to places I’d been to before that I’d loved – New York City in particular – and found myself daydreaming about where I would go and how nice it would be if I could just open my study door, step through and be somewhere else. That was really the starting point. Then I remembered an idea I’d once had for a magical book that could turn any door into every door and I wondered how I would use that book in the real world. The most fun thing about writing it was… Thinking up the different magical books featured throughout the plot and trying to come up with how each book’s power could be used in an interesting way.

The most challenging thing was definitely the fact that I didn’t plan any of it – I just made it up as I went. That created some plot problems that took me a long while to work out how to resolve!

My writing habits are… To write where and whenever I can. I work full-time in a pretty demanding job, so I have to fit my writing around that. Writing is sometimes the last thing I do at night or the first thing I do in the morning. Sometimes I do it when I’m commuting, sometimes in my lunch break. I have written on planes and trains, but not yet in automobiles because that makes me travel sick. The key is consistency. As long as I can do something every day, I don’t feel the guilt and know the book is progressing.