With A PLACE IN THE HILLS, Michelle's writing talent started to become more and more recognized. "Glorious storytelling!" wrote Sarah Broadhurst in The Bookseller, picking it as one of the Big Name Paperbacks of the Year. "A big, sweeping drama for all ages" she enthusued, "Michelle Paver is definitely a star in the making. This is the sort of book you curl up with and hope it never ends. Great!" A PLACE IN THE HILLS is based on an original idea: it tells of two parallel love stories taking place more than two thousand years apart. Here, Michelle reveals how set about creating such a timeless story...

On rare occasions, you can point to a moment in your life which changed everything.  We all experience them. But they are few and far between.  In a recent issue of Sainsbury's magazine, Michelle revealed how a chance meeting on a railway journey unleashed a chain of events which totally changed her life... and set her firmly on the right track...

After her success with her first book, WITHOUT CHARITY, Michelle embarked on a trilogy. THE SHADOW CATCHER is the first in the Daughters of Eden series, which included FEVER HILL (book two) and THE SERPENT'S TOOTH (book three). The themes were as vast as the historical sweep of the series: from grimy London to magically oppressive Jamaica, and thence to the Great War. Always fanatical about her research, Michelle travelled the highways and byways of lesser-known Jamaica, way off the tourist path, looking for the colour, detail and character that gives all her writing the unmistakable stamp of authenticity. In this interview, she explains how she set about her journey of discovery…

This short story is a little present from Michelle to all her readers...

This was the book that set Michelle on her writing career.  WITHOUT CHARITY was a tour-de-force that immediately established her as a major writing talent: she was hailed as "the new Daphne du Maurier", and selected as one of WH Smith's most promising young novelists. In this feature, she reveals how it all began...

Even before she could read, Michelle was fascinated by a book her parents owned which contained beautiful pictures of life in the Stone Age. Then as a ten-year-old she became passionately keen on wolves. She longed to hunt with a bow and arrow, make her own shelters - and of course, to have her own wolf! Since they lived in London, her parents gave her a spaniel instead! Nevertheless, she managed to get rid of her bed and sleep on the floor; and she dug up her parents' lawn, and grew strange medicinal herbs. many years went by until the next opporunity arose for Michelle to get closer to her dream...

How did Michelle set about creating Torak's world? Six thousand years ago (i.e. after that Ice Age but before farming) the people of northern Europe lived in small clans, hunting and gathering their food. Michelle wanted the reader to be there in the Forest with Torak and Renn and Wolf: to experience the sights, smells, sounds, and feelings of the adventure. To recreate this almost-vanished universe, she decided to track down the last remaining traces of this way of life. This is how she did it...

What made her start writing? What other jobs has she done? Why can't she whistle? You can find answers to these and many more things you never knew about Michelle in this, the most comprehensive collection of interview questions and answers about her ever assembled...