Following the success of The Boy Who Stole the Pharoah’s Lunch, much-loved writer Karen McCombie returns with The Accidental Vikings – an imaginative time-slip romp which sees Alfie and Kat swept back to the Viking era.

In this exclusive feature, Karen reveals how she makes history come alive for her readers, and explains why the past can be such a powerful gateway into reading for children.

"I was at primary school precisely a zillion years ago, but still vividly remember my last term of Yr6 (Scottish P7). It was totally ruined by the fact that we did reams of writing and endless projects around our class read – Beowulf. What I learned from that experience is that I don’t like myths, battles, fear and gore (even if plenty of my classmates did!). In comparison, the topic I found myself completely immersed in was the Victorians: street children, chimney sweeps, matchstick girls; steam trains, Florence Nightingale, Bazalgette’s super-sewers!

And aged 10, if you’d asked where I’d time-travel to if I had the chance, I would’ve instantly said The Great Exhibition of 1851. Actually, my answer would be the same today. A breathtakingly vast glass building filled with wonders of the world and the latest technological inventions of the era…? Yes, please!

But what I think really helped bring the Victorian topic to life for little-kid-me was my connection to the Queen herself… I grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland, not far from Balmoral Castle, where Queen Victoria came to decompress. After learning about the teenie Queenie at school, I got to nosey at the royal train carriage – housed in a railway station museum – that took HRH and her many, many children to this pretty corner of Scotland. Afterwards, I’d meander up the same hills as she had, taking in the exact same views, even sitting on a scratchy tartan rug with my family, just as she would’ve done. (Though I can’t see Her Maj picnic-ing on a packet of Golden Wonder crisps and a Wagon Wheel). That overlap of our two lives, however tenuous, made Queen Vic feel real to me; made that whole time period feel real, in fact, and not simply something stuffy behind a glass case.

Fast forward a few decades and I was chatting to my now young adult son about which topics he remembered from primary school. The most vivid for him was the Ancient Egyptians… helped by a wildly enthusiastic newly qualified teacher and a props-maker parent who was luckily between contracts. The handy dad decorated the classroom with a spectacular pyramid plus several 6ft palm trees made of cardboard rolls. Children and staff from around the school formed an orderly queue to come gasp at the spectacle.

After that conversation, I started noodling around with an Ancient Egypt storyline. The trouble was, I kept struggling to find a way into the story, till I realised I was stuck behind the glass, looking in, and not connecting. What was the path that could take me into the past, and the readers too? That’s when I hit on the time-travel idea; having a modern-day boy, the class clown, stumble from a disastrous assembly on the Ancient Egyptian topic to being INSIDE the topic itself! It just made everything seems more tangible and touchable. I’m pleased to say that the resulting book, The Boy Who Stole the Pharaoh’s Lunch has been pretty popular in schools.

Flip to last year, when I visited York with my 23-year-old son, and we found ourselves on the brilliant back-in-time ride at the famous Jorvik Centre, travelling through a replica Viking village, complete with sounds and smells of the times. Yes, it was a novelty – with the class of children around us “eww!”-ing at the nose-tickling waft of dung – but it did make the Viking history come that bit more alive for all of us.

Inevitably, I started to write my second time-slip novel, where two mismatched children find their own path to the past, after being made to sit together in a car on an automated ride through a replica Viking village, and… well, you can always read The Accidental Vikings to see what happens next!

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Karen McCombie is the bestselling author of over 90 books for children and teenagers including the Carnegie Medal-nominated Little Bird Flies, How to be a Human and My Family, the Enemy, and is the author of the bestselling and much-loved series Ally’s World.

If like Karen and her son, you enjoy reading about the Egyptians take a look at 20 Children's Books about the History and Mystery of Ancient Egypt

The Accidental Vikings is published by Barrington Stoke, and is available to purchase now. Read our review and download an opening extract.