A gloriously spooky and unusual tale tells of a strange old house and the very strange family who live in it. It is a family with a difference, a small family whose size and shape have been changed over the generations leading to them, most unusually, living under the floorboards. What happens to this family, including the haunting of it by two greedy ghouls, makes a quirky adventure full of twists and turns and some unexpected surprises. Fans of The Borrowers will love it as will readers of the delightful series featuring Tumtum and Nutmeg, the mice who live in a broom cupboard!
This is an exciting and action-packed story of the Honourable Ratts - an unusual, rodent-like family who have passed their heydey. Now, their enemies have tracked them down and they must do anything they can to search for the family treasure and secure it. But with the villains on their trail, who will get there first?
I was born in Canada and grew up in a log cabin in Quebec. My childhood was spent playing in the forests and messing about on the Gatineau River. It was a wonderful wild time and in many ways is the source of all of my writing. Children's writers are an eccentric bunch. Someone once said they never grow up and in many ways, this is probably true in my case. I write books for children from five to fifteen years old. The ability to recall how you felt and what your world was like at a particular point in your childhood is something that all children's writers share. It's like pushing a rewind switch and going back in time. Many of my natural history books for children, like THINK OF AN EEL, which won awards on both sides of the Atlantic, IMAGINE YOU ARE A TIGER, or I AM A TYRANNOSAURUS REX all reflect my own sense of wonder exploring the woods and the river around me when I was a child. Years later, I wrote about this childhood in my first novel RASPBERRIES ON THE YANGTZE, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize.
