Catherine Rundell

You've spent the day with a bunch of school kids.

What happened?

They were completely enchanting.

So I was talking about how you might shape a story and where the flashes of inspiration that begin a story happen.

And they were wonderful.

And I had been telling them about my sort of slightly unusual research trips.

I went to the Amazon to research the Explorer and I went climbing rooftops to research rooftoppers.

And then so when the questions happened, they were almost all about research.

roof topping and tightrope walking and tarantulas, which I think is exactly what you want from children.

so i have always loved the idea in fiction that you can create a hidden world that only a few have access to of course that's how harry potter works and narnia but i wanted my world to be real world so what i have is a world in which children live hidden lives up on the rooftops of paris in sort of gangs and we don't know they're there because we never look up but they're there on the palais justice and on notre dame and my heroine sophie discovers them

and goes running across the rooftops at night with them.

And the idea is that she thereby sees a completely different city.

I think I've always wanted to conjure for children a sense that the deeply improbable is possible.

So my stories always have something in them that's very unlikely.

You know, children ride wolves across the wilds of Russia,

But I want to give kids a sense that the world we live in is teeming and chaotic and beautiful and various and completely extraordinary.

And so even if my stories are a little bit unbelievable, I want them to have in them the core truth that this world is breathtaking.

That's very true.

So rooftop stems in part from a slightly unusual hobby of roof climbing, which is a sort of tradition of it at Oxford University, which is where I studied.

And so you go at night and you climb up.