Emily Diamand interview and exclusive Reavers extract
March 28th, 2008, 4:11 pm Hobbies Ideas
Emily Diamand’s Reavers was the unanimous winner of the first Times/Chicken
House Children’s Fiction Competition, but she seemed almost too good to be
true. Was her surname really Diamand? Was this genuinely her first novel?
Was she truly a young mother with an 18-month-old baby, just like J.K.
Rowling when Barry Cunningham spotted her?
Yes, to all the above. The surname comes from Diamand’s Romanian grandfather,
who came to Britain after the First World War. The 37-year-old daughter of a
scientist and a teacher grew up in Oxfordshire and has worked most of her
life for Friends of the Earth, which may go some way to explaining the
brilliantly imagined background to her novel. Set about 200 years in the
future when climate change has caused sea levels to rise, Reavers is
about what happens when a fisher-girl takes on the corruption of politicians
and the bloodthirsty pirates called reavers.
When I was a child, the big thing was nuclear war, she said. Now it’s the
same for children about climate change. The difference is that I always felt
that with nuclear war there was never any hope of survivors. I wanted to
write something which showed part of the scenario, but in which people had
carried on and could have adventures.
What adventures they are, too. The heroine Lily realises that the reavers have
killed Lily’s adored grandmother while she was out fishing. They’ve also
kidnapped the Prime Minister’s daughter and Lily discovers a conspiracy
involving a jewel that everyone is after. Her best friend is going to be
conscripted, and in an attempt to save him, Lily and her cat sail to London
(now Lunden) to try to find the missing seven-year-old, Alexandra.
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