Whoohooo! Good news! https://twitter.com/hivestores/status/1246080753416486912

Welcome to #SongBeneathLaunch day. Raising a virtual glass and best of luck to fellow authors & illustrators as our books sail into choppy waters together. In the meantime here's a little taste of what lies behind mine ... #unitedbybooks #SongBeneaththeTides @guppybooks

Love story, ghost story, thriller: so many things inspired it, I've lost track. It's partly an act of memory - but it's fiction, set in a fictional country on Africa's eastern coast. It flows from obsessions I've had since childhood in Kenya. It's Ally and Leli's tale.

Ally, from England, on her first visit to Africa. Leli, from the nearby village of Shanza, eagerly sweeping her into his life and the life of his community. The bond between them is swift. Leli:

Yet unnerving things are happening. Ally, in a forest 'at once has the same sensation of nearness, of brushing the warm contours of something live, of eyes following her, of a soft breath exhaled ... a longing, like an emptiness deep in her centre ...'

Leli dreams: 'a man stood tall in the surf ... He turned his face towards Leli. Leli's feet sank deep in the soft sand, and the water lapped high around him, but he could not move. The white of the man's cloth rippled round his body. Leli felt his eyes, searching, speaking ...'

And there's Shanza's island, Kisiri, place of legend, haunted by birds ...

... place of secrets, of strange winds and tides, buried coral reefs and impenetrable caves. And now threatened in ways no one understands ...

Ally:

And whose is the third voice whose story weaves through Ally and Leli's? #VirtualBookLaunch #SongBeneathLaunch