The Disappearances (33 page)

Lucas took a deep breath, then forced himself to smile.

‘I can hope,’ he said. ‘I can always hope …’

Thank you, as ever, to Kate Howard, my editor, and everyone at Hodder who has worked so hard to bring this series to life, especially Eleni Lawrence and Justine Taylor.

Thank you to Dorie Simmonds, my wonderful agent. And huge thanks to Alan Greenspan, whose thoughts and ideas prompted a major rewrite of this book, for the better, I hope …!

And finally thank you to all of you who find the time to get in touch and spur me on. I couldn’t do it without you!

‘So, where to begin? School? Hmmm. School was okay. Great in some ways, not so great in others. I’m someone who likes to do things my own way, rather than following rules and that’s not so easy in the regimen of the class-room. But I loved English – I had a wonderful teacher, Miss Pitt, who got me super excited about Chaucer. I really looked forward to those lessons.

Then university. I studied Philosophy, which I loved too – it’s basically about arguing your point. Not just arguing your point; it’s about challenging assumptions, asking difficult questions, having to come up with cogent reasons for things you’ve always just ‘known’ to be true. And I joined a band, too. Lots of fun. We toured Japan, toured France, had an album in the in die charts … I edited the university newspaper, too. If you want to write, I always say that the best thing to do is … write. Don’t talk about it, just do it, and if you wind up writing about something that doesn’t entirely fascinate you then great – writing is hard and you have to work at it. My first job in journalism was writing about pensions – if you can make them interesting, you can make pretty much anything interesting. Going for the hard option is often the best way to learn in my opinion.

So anyway, that’s a bit about me. But you’re probably not really that interested in what I got up to years ago. Maybe you’re more interested in why I wrote my books? If you are, read on …’

Which children’s authors most inspire you?

My favourite children’s authors are those who, in my opinion, make the most of the genre with great story-telling, extensive imagination, and who aren’t afraid to tackle difficult and complicated subjects. Philip Pullman is certainly one, as are Meg Rosoff, Jennifer Donnelly and Jacqueline Wilson. I think that Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are also absolutely wonderful.

Do you have any particular habits or rituals when you write?

I don’t have too many rituals when it comes to writing — I sit looking out into the garden, which is lovely and I can’t even start thinking about writing until I’ve had a cup of hot, steaming tea. Other than that, I try to clear my mind completely, think about my characters, and then write as much as I can before my next tea break!

What career path would you have taken, if you hadn’t become an author?

I’d like to say an astronaut or an adventurer, but I think I would have ended up writing in some way — perhaps as a journalist, or perhaps working in education. I might even have become a teacher — I think working with young people and getting them excited in a book, a subject or the world around them is about the most rewarding thing you can do.

Does it take a long time to write a novel?

It really depends — it can take weeks, months or even years! Sometimes a book just flows out of you; other times you have to wrench it out.

What inspired you to choose the dystopian setting?

I love to think of a utopia – in this case, a world without evil – and turning it on its head, looking for the flip side. Because the truth is, I don’t think that utopia exists. Humans are fallible and that’s what makes life such a roller-coaster ride. I like the ups and downs; without them things would be very dull. And don’t we all appreciate the summer more after a long, cold winter?

1 T
HE
M
ATRIX

Just such a brilliant concept and makes you really think about what happiness really means.

2 N
EVER
L
ET
M
E
G
O

A brutal look at our desperation for health and longevity and what we’ll do to achieve it.

3 1984

Unlike many film adaptations, this film is almost as good as the book it-self. Utterly haunting.

4 L
OGAN’S
R
UN

Life is for pleasure and everyone dies before they’re 30 … Essential viewing for young people everywhere!

5 B
LADE
R
UNNER

Dystopia, sci-fi, human drones … My idea of film heaven!

6 T
HE
T
ERMINATOR

I love this film and its sequels. Just the right mix of action, emotion and philosophical/political thought.

7 M
ETROPOLIS

A world divided into ‘thinkers’ and ‘workers’ who need each other to survive yet never meet... Made in the1920s but just as relevant now...

8 A C
LOCKWORK
O
RANGE

Utterly terrifying but so well made and very convincing.

9 B
RAZIL

Confirms everything I’ve always hated about bureaucracy...

10 S
LEEPER

The funniest dystopian film ever made and a warning bell against conformity and following all the rules.

Discover the first book in Gemma Malley’s powerful and gripping dystopian series

Everyone accepted that people were different physically.

But inside?

Inside, they were different too.

You just had to know how to tell, what to look for.

Evil has been eradicated. The City has been established. And citizens may only enter after having the ‘evil’ part of their brain removed. They are labelled on the System according to how ‘good’ they are. If they show signs of the evil emerging, they are labelled a K … But no one knows quite what that means. Only that they disappear, never to be seen again …

Available now in paperback and eBook

Take a look at what some of Gemma’s readers thought about THE KILLABLES:

‘
The Killables
is amazing. The story has an excellent quality which is as soon as you put it down you're itching to pick it up again just so you can know what happens next. Or your mind is reeling at all the different possibilities of what could happen. That's a thing I love to have in certain books because it completely sucks you in and is unbearable to put down.’

Charlotte Wheeler

‘I found
The Killables
by Gemma Malley very enjoyable and hard to put down … I can’t wait to read Gemma Malley’s next book in the series –
The Disappearances
. If it’s as good as her first then there’s no doubt I will enjoy it!’

Amy Langston

‘In
The Killables
, Malley creates a denunciation environment. Although this was not my typical genre of book I would read I found myself gripped after the first page.’

Bethany Ellis

‘I really enjoyed this book as I enjoy dystopian novels. I thought the plot was really clever and I loved the love triangle between Raffy, Evie and Lucas.’

Darcy Frayne

‘The vivid descriptions and debatable morals help this book seem like a realistic and terrifying future for the world. With developments in science and people becoming more corrupt, it doesn’t seem unrealistic that a city would surface, where evil was supposedly eradicated.’

Eleanor Gadsby

‘It really did captivate my imagination and send me into the universe in which this book is set.’

Grace McGarry

Take a sneak peek at what happens in the final book in THE KILLABLES series

Evie, Raffy, Benjamin and Linus are locked inside a luxurious but austere prison. Their only contact with the strange world outside is via the screens covering the walls, screens filled with images of people going about their lives; people who don’t know they exist; people who appear to willingly live their lives being watched all the time, not by a System but by each other; people who have no idea about the prisoners living within their midst. It is a strange world that makes no sense to Evie, and it is a world that she is desperate to leave. But Thomas, Linus’s nemesis, has other plans. Unless Linus can reproduce The System, Thomas will kill the mall and destroy the City – the City where Lucas is waiting desperately for word from Evie, word that she is coming back to him.

And then a girl from the outside world, a girl they have watched for hours on their screens, stumbles upon the truth, about Thomas, about the City, about the Horrors. Immediately she is plunged into a nightmare that shocks her to her core, but it soon turns out that her discovery wasn’t an accident at all; that one of the prisoners was behind it. And now it’s a race against time to expose Thomas and his regime before he takes his revenge on her, on Evie, Linus, Raffy and Benjamin, on everything they have ever known and everything they have ever loved …

Coming April 2013…