Black Waters ranges from true stories of the Dunkirk evacuation to current anxieties around cyber-bullying. There are oystermen and drug barons, modern mass produced sailing dinghies and bizarre WW1 prototypes. As with all Julia Jones’s stories the boundaries between fact and fiction are as permeable as the Essex coastline where this new volume is set.
Readers young and old can be assured that the historical research has been meticulous and the creeks and rivers thoroughly explored.
With a new dinghy, a committed sponsor and a place on the pre-Olympic training camp Xanthe Ribiero assumes that she's set for success. Instead she finds herself disgraced and forced into hiding. She gets a job as a volunteer sailing instructor in a dead-end village on the Essex marshes. The feuding and old hatreds of the indigenous inhabitants are as muddy as their intertwining creeks and why are the children so pale and secretive? Xanthe is an outsider in Flinthammock – her landlady believes she is a witch – but hers is the clearer view that will finally reveal the truth.
Black Waters is a stand-alone title. However it can be seen as connecting particularly closely with Ghosting Home, volume 3 in the Strong Winds series. Each new book adds something more to the final denouement which will be complete in volume 7.
Black Waters is a story of detection as much as adventure and the influence of Margery Allingham is as important as that of Arthur Ransome.
Julia Jones as a child, steering Peter Duck, the boat bought from Arthur Ramsome that inspired his classic Swallows and Amazons.
When Julia Jones was three years old her parents bought Peter Duck, Arthur Ransome’s former yacht. Julia slept in the place that had been designed for Ransome to store his typewriter and it wasn’t long before she was reading her way through the Swallows and Amazons series. Boats and books have been part of her life ever since. As an adult she founded and ran a village bookshop and developed a local publishing list for older readers. She became close friends with Joyce Allingham, sister of Essex detective novelist Margery Allingham, and has written and edited three biographical works connected with the Allingham family with the fourth, Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory, scheduled for publication in 2012. The Salt-Stained Book was her first novel for younger readers and is also enjoyed by adults. Followed up by A Ravelled Flag, the Strong Winds trilogy is concluded with Ghosting Home, out in July 2012. Julia has five children and lives in Essex and Suffolk with her partner, Francis Wheen. In 1999 they re-purchased Peter Duck.
CLICK HERE to read an article by Julia Jones, which was inspired in part by Arthur Ransome’s sailing adventures and in particular by Peter Duck, the boat which she was brought up on and which had previously been owned by Arthur Ransome.
As an adult she founded and ran a village bookshop and developed a local publishing list for older readers. She became close friends with Joyce Allingham, sister of Essex detective novelist Margery Allingham, and has written and edited three biographical works connected with the Allingham family with the fourth, Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory, scheduled for publication in 2012. The Salt-Stained Book was her first novel for younger readers and is also enjoyed by adults. Followed up by A Ravelled Flag, the Strong Winds trilogy is concluded with Ghosting Home, out in July 2012. Julia has five children and lives in Essex and Suffolk with her partner, Francis Wheen. In 1999 they re-purchased Peter Duck.
