Why a Booktrail?
1984: A young girl goes missing in Suffolk whilst sailing with her family but her little sister is convinced she is still alive
Without You
What you need to know before your trail
When 17-year-old Eva goes missing at sea, everyone presumes that she drowned. Her parents’ relationship is falling apart, undermined by guilt and grief. But her younger sister, Faith, just doesn’t believe that her sister has drowned. No, she is convinced that she is trapped on a nearby island, a spooky chilling place with abandoned huts- where the army used to use for top secret But look closer – is there a face at one of the windows?
Travel Guide
Spooky Suffolk – the landscape evoked and eerily captured on the page is largely inspired by the author’s love of Suffolk and its history. Although the shingle beach, caravan park and village and Holt House are in themselves fictional, they are based on real places with very real histories and mysteries of their own.
Orford Ness – the inspiration for the shingle beach and the island in the novel – itself a large area of shingle, sand, mudflat and salt marsh that lies between the river and the North Sea. The author researched this area and discovered that it had been used by the war department created airfields there for the Experimental Flying Section and which then started to be used for experiments for weapons, bombs and rockets.
The barns that can be seen are also remnants from that time and are used in the novel for an even greater chilling effect. The landscape in reality and that evoked by Saskia for the backdrop of a remote and chilling thriller work brilliantly together. One girl lost at sea, her sister believing that she is alive and being trapped on the island by something or someone…
The story of the Wild Man – That someone she believes is the Wild Man – a mythical creature – based on a real story about a man who was found by fisherman naked and covered in hair. Unable to speak English, he was taken and imprisoned in Orford Castle…
The myth is still a powerful tale in Suffolk today and the weaving of it into the mind of a child, in a modern day thriller is yet another brush stroke on the canvas that “Without you’ paints of Suffolk.
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