Catherine Rundell

to the tallest buildings of Oxford, and then you can look down and see the city laid out.

And it was while I was up on, in fact, the rooftop of my college, All Souls College, that I had the idea for rooftoppers.

I thought, what if we put the children here?

It is a real thing.

And I spent quite a lot of my early and mid-twenties climbing skyscrapers in London.

I climbed Battersea Power Station.

But never, not like I'm free solo, I would never climb anything where if I fell, I would die.

It's a very limited risk.

And the point of it is not the risk.

The point of it is the view from the top.

Is also the point of it breaking rules?

It is fairly completely illegal.

But if you got caught, you wouldn't go to prison.

It's a misdemeanor rather than a crime.

Exactly.

So I think one of the things that children want from their fiction is...

a sense of autonomy, because children in this world, the adult world is bewildering and it makes the rules.

So fiction in which children can set up their own laws, often by breaking adult laws and creating the chaos necessary for a story to thrive.

That's what I want to put in my book.

So it was partly because I went to the Amazon jungle and the world I saw there was so completely extraordinary that I wanted to try to give children a little taste of that sort of heartbreaking beauty of the Amazon and to show them as well, to try to make them fall in love with it so that they would want to cherish it and protect it because the Amazon is at such horrendous risk at the moment.