Why a Booktrail?
1932, 2000s: Careful of the friends you choose, and careful what you could still lose…
The Companion
What you need to know before your trail
Billy Shaw lives in a palace. Potter’s Pleasure Palace, the best entertainment venue in Yorkshire, complete with dancing, swing-boats and a roller-skating rink.
He’s soon sent up to the big house above the valley to be companion to the little boy there. He’s no normal child however – stranger than anything Billy’s ever seen in his travelling show and peculiar to in his ways of being the only child in a very curiously haphazard household.
The air is filled with secrets and when tragedy strikes, the house and all those in it are reluctant to give any secrets up
Locations
Reset- England - Yorkshire - Hebden Bridge
- A: "Ackerdean Mill" - Gibson Mill
- B: "Ackerdean Mill" - Hardcastle Crags
- C: Hebden Old Packhorse Bridge
Travel Guide
Yorkshire
Gibson Mill
The author mentions that she was inspired by real place to set her fictional Ackerdean Manor – and it’s a beautiful National Trust property that you can visit, take your book, and spend the day pretending you’re living the surreal life that Billy Shaw does at the Pleasure Palace.
“It were no fairy-tale palace, There weren’t so turret or towers, Chandeliers or fancy staircases. But we had the biggest swing boats this side of the Pennines, and you can’t swing a lass till she screams off a chandelier, well, not without a blooming’big big ladder”
This Gibson Mill really was an cotton mill and then an entertainment emporium like the one in the story. There’s such history and the ingenius thread of a story right there. Of course, take in the amazing moors and valleys around it and these are also stunningly evoked in the novel, so that you can really get a sense and feel of the place and time.
The big fine house
The house where the writers, the Harpers live, and where Billy goes to be a companion is fictional but it seems very real indeed:
“I knew High Hob well enough once it came into view. It were one of them places that I’ve always known were there but never thought much about it. It had its back to the Ackerdean Valley, like it had no interest in us either”
“It were a heck of a big house for three people. Sharp-edged, with its gables and chimneys prodding the sky. Stubby trees and a low stone wall looped round the side and front to make a sort of garden. Though what could they grow up there? All that grew natural that hight were heather and sheep, and them clouds”
Feel the Yorkshire landscape, the magic of the raw and natural landscape, the wild weather, the difference between rich and poor and secrets which get stuck in the thick Yorkshire grasses. There’s lots of Yorkshire words and phrases used throughout, the characters speak with passion and according to their social status and the Yorkshire turn of phrase “Mebbes for maybe” and “Summat’ for something and humour adds to the charm of the entire novel:
” I carried on slicing the ham for the sandwiches as if there were no other though in my head. The ham had to be extra thin or we wouldn’t get enough out of it”
“Potter says you’re bright. I’m sure you and Jasper will get on famously. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Archilles and Patroclus.” “Do they live here too?”
Streetview Maps
A) Yorkshire- Hebden Bridge - Gibson Mill
B) Yorkshire- Hebden Bridge - Packhorse Bridge
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
What a marvellously creepy and unsettling novel! Ooh from that first page, this was a page turner and shivers went down my spine. I LOVED Billy Shaw and his family. Despite the poverty and the misery, there is a real sense of commnity and freinship between the characters. When I found out that the Palace was real (well sort of) it filled me with a sense of excitement. I lvoe novels which take a real building or real story and spin in into a fictinal mystery. Well, this mystery was so well done and expertly crafted that it lasted the entire novel and the pace never let up. Hardly room to breathe if I’m honest – Sarah Dunnakey you have unsettled me big time!
It’s a novel to savour and read slowly but surely – enjoy the sense of creepiness even before that weird boy Jasper appears. I wanted to grab hold of Billy’s hand and get him out of there. Billy was a great character – his humour and fun way of seeing life belied his difficult start in life and his troubled life so far. He goes up to the house not even knowing what a companion was. Ah, and when he thinks that the characters from a book are going to be living in the house with them! It does turn out that the book 1984 does have a role to play..
There’s so much to enjoy with this novel. The writing is clever, the language funny and spot on, the Yorkshire charm both in the landscape and the people very evident indeed. The mystery slowly unravels and really ramps up towards the end and oh what a tangled web some people weave! Those Yorkshire moors hold many many secrets – it’s not just the place where women are locked in attics and men in cloaks go wandering across them…no there’s an old house where two writers live and where a strange little boy seems to rule the roost…
This is such an immersive read and I loved every creepy second of it. I won’t forget Jasper or Billy for a very long time .
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Companion
Destination : Yorkshire, Hebden Bridge Author/Guide: Sarah Dunnakey Departure Time: 1932, 2000s
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