Thornhill

A darkly gripping tale of two girls separated by thirty years but pulled together by a house.

Pam Smy has created a wonderful piece of work in Thornhill. The drawings are full of atmosphere, the words are full of tension and emotion all the more powerful for being so sparingly revealed. This is in one sense a classic English lonely-child-and-garden story, in the tradition of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Philippa Pearce; in another it's a ghost story; in another it pays tribute to the dark-sinister-house genre most famously seen in Hitchcock's Psycho. But it's also a story of friendship and courage and of the power of black-and-white images. I think it's terrific

A rule breaker . . . an unsettling, deeply memorable read

Astonishing . . . filmic, atmospheric and suspenseful

Pam Smy studied Illustration at Anglia Ruskin University, going on to complete the MA Children's Book Illustration in 2004. She combines her role as lecturer in illustration with illustrating fiction. Pam lives in Cambridge.