Mal Peet was a multi-award-winning novelist best known for his young adult fiction, including Keeper, Tamar, and Life: An Unexploded Diagram. His novels were nominated for and won several awards including the Carnegie Medal, the Branford Boase Award, and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. In 2017 his final novel Beck was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Mal passed away in 2015.||Emma Shoard is an illustrator and printmaker who graduated in 2011 from Kingston University’s Illustration & Animation course. She also works part-time as a bookseller for Daunt Books. Emma has twice been longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal for her work on Siobhan Dowd’s The Pavee and the Buffer Girl and Mal Peet’s The Family Tree.

"There are many writers who can take you inside a nightmare. It takes Mal Peel to show you the way back out" – Frank Cottrell Boyce"A beautiful book … simple but profound" – Just Imagine"Peet pulls no punches in exploring the life and mind of a teen suffering from anxiety. The engaging, sparsely written narrative is suspensful and keeps the reader guessing all the way. Shoard's haunting, murky illustrations work perfectly. A super-readable, unnerving work that stands with the late Peet's best" – CBI, Recommended Reads