Scrap, the second novel by Llanwrtyd Wells-based author Kathy Biggs, delves into life’s gritty challenges but ultimately brims with humour and hope, writes Jenny White...

NOT so long ago, Kathy Biggs was sitting in a van in a Swansea scrapyard, waiting for her builder husband to finish a transaction while idly watching the people at work. She found it fascinating and, as she watched, a line came into her head: “The kid was in the back of the car for a week before we found him.”

Suddenly, just as she was finishing her first novel – The Luck – she had found the opening line for her second novel.

“I was in the throes of getting The Luck ready to submit, so I was right at the beginning of my writing journey,” she says.

“I couldn’t let myself write this line down because I couldn’t let myself get distracted. But just before the end of December that year, I got the submissions off and I sat down twiddling my thumbs and I wrote that first line – and that was it, I was off.”

What unfolded was a truly original, big-hearted story of three people who feel like they are on life’s scrap heap, but whose lives are changed when they discover a mysterious boy living in a car in the scrapyard where they work – a boy who can draw pictures of the future.

“When I started writing, I already knew that my characters Mackie and Charles and Trev would be downtrodden – life’s casualties – and I knew that this kid was going to be the person who changed things for them,” she says.

While the boy’s abilities bring an element of magic to the book, it’s also a tale grounded in the harsh realities of life – Mackie, for example, has been dealt some unbearably tough blows, spanning tragic loss and mental breakdown.

He and the boy form an unlikely friendship,