Spoken

Gods and Warriors is Michelle Paver's latest book and she has gone back to writing children's stories after her ghost book Dark Matter. Of course I wanted to know all the ins and outs and her inspirations for this book.

Our schedules didn't coincide so we ended up doing a phone interview which I hope you'll enjoy.

I had just broken my right wrist in two places so was a bit nervous about travelling to London to intervivew Jasper Fforde about his Thursday Next Series.

We met on my birthday July 9th at Watersones 5th Floor Restaurant to do the deed! I discovered that as in his books he is just as quirky and very very mischevious! Indeed I found that nothing would be off limits for ideas for his books - everything is up for grabs - in fact he is an observer of life and people and any situation he comes across.

As you can imagine both my colleague Wendy and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting him - I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did interviewing him with his very chatty style.

Having read poet and author Sjon books I really wanted to know more about his unusual style of writing, bringing in his love of connecting myththology and reality together. We met at the 5th floor restaurant at Waterstones Piccadilly and had a very interesting chat abput his work and influences.

It wasn't until Kraft decided to buy Cadbury's the iconic chocolate manufacturer that people suddenly realised that our Governments were more than happy to sell off our British Companies - especially our utility ones. Alex Brumme - the award winning Daily Mail City Editor - has written a brilliant and very fair book detailing why these sales happen.

Here in this interview with me he explains in even more detail his concerns.

In early June, David and I went down to Cranborne Dorset to meet up with Luke Gamble and chat with him about his latest book The Vet:The Big Wild World. We met him in his tiny surgery Pilgrims where he first struck out on his own - we also met up with some of the WVS gang - Chris, James and Linda. Both Chris and James and one other person were squeezed into a back room because Linda was squashed in the front into the most amazing oldie worldy bookshop that I could have spent hours in just perusing the books there! However we were there to do an interview!!

Luke took us to the back of the surgery to a very large shed where WVS and Pet Air started but which now housed medical donations, to be sent around the world to vets and charities working with the local people helping and educating them in look ing after their animals.

During our conversation (with input from Angel, Luke's 7 month old ridgeback puppy) I came to realise that Luke is somewhat a visionary about animal care and how to involve people. He has an ocean full of enthusiasm and tremendous determination.

Having met Dacre Stoker over the phone in 2009 when I interviewed him on the Dracula sequel - 'Dracula:The Undead' and enjoyed the book I wanted to find out more about Bram Stoker his great grand uncle. so we met at Waterstone's in Piccadilly up on the 5th floor resaurant to have a chat and learn more about the Lost Journals.

I loved Kerrie Sackville's book 'When My Husband does the Dishes - he usually wants sex!' because it is very funny and very very accurate to say the least and I wanted to meet her and find out was it all true! Amazingly we found we had so much in common in what happens when you're raising kids. Enjoy the interview it was a fun one.

Having read Lorna Byrne's uplifting book 'A Message from the Angels' I wanted to find out more about her relationship with them; and so I did one of my very rare telephone interviews as Lorna lives in Ireland, and discovered a wonderful and caring person, who very much wanted to tell us about how the angels were and are always there to help us in every which way.

The 2011 London Book Fair was incredibly hectic running from one meeting to another, and when we finally met Dmitri Glukhovsky it was at the end of a very hectic day for him and he was exhausted, but he still very kindly gave us a brilliant interview in a very noisy cafe in the Earls Court building about his fantasy book 'Metro 2033'

I very much enjoyed meeting and interviewing Sergei Luyanenko at the London Book Fair 2011 in the very noisy cafe in the Earls Court building, where he talked about his Night Watch fantasy series with the help of Masha who acted as his translator. Sergei even through translation had a terrific sense of humour which I hope you'll enjoy.