Will Rycroft

Now, anybody hearing those three elevator pitches will understand how different these three books are.

But if I was looking for a unifying feature of them, you could say that you as authors really do put.

your readers through some very extreme emotions in these books and I wanted to ask first of all whether when writing in that sort of way it exerts any kind of toll on you as the writer in the same way that it does for the reader when they come to read it.

I will come to you first Gio.

How about you Stephanie?

That's a fantastic answer, Stephanie.

Thank you so much for sharing that.

And Tara?

That's really interesting.

You've sort of slightly preempted what I was going to ask you actually to start off with, Tara, because what I've noticed is that with these three books, the responses from the booksellers has obviously been incredibly personal.

One of our booksellers in Romsey called Emily

said that they were 14 when the Boxing Day tsunami happened.

And I can remember how it shook the world.

It was the first natural disaster on that scale that I had seen.

The best books change my perception and bring something I thought I knew into a different light.

And this book is one of those, which I thought was a really interesting thing to say about Underwater.

As you say, you have your personal response to it, but then turning it into fiction is something very different.

So I wondered...

having had that sort of person, because I think you were in Singapore, weren't you, when it happened?

But sort of then your approach to writing about it, having watched that, as you say, horrible footage, what was it that you wanted, I suppose, to communicate through your depiction of the actual tsunami and its immediate aftermath?