Paula Hillman, author

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Rebecca Solnit.

My head has long been full of stories. Much of my childhood was spent in
libraries, borrowing as many books as it was possible to carry home. Ruth
Manning-Saunders and Rosemary Sutcliffe, Alan Garner and Kevin Crossley-Holland provided me with fascination and inspiration (the bleakness of the Welsh landscape, the seep of it into the characters of Alice, Gwyn, and Roger in The Owl Service, has stayed with me).

When I left my teaching career, just over two years ago, I wanted nothing more than to write, and to write well. I enrolled on the MA Creative Writing course at Lancaster University. Across the summer, whilst I waited for Michaelmas term to commence, I sat at my laptop, typing away. Seaview House was the result. It was a dark, raw, and completely chaotic eighty-thousand-word story, with neither shape nor style, but it was my
creation.

I lived on Walney Island for ten years, before moving to the mainland
in the mid-eighties, when rapidly increasing traffic meant the road-bridge was constantly snarled up; a three-mile homeward journey could take more than an hour. But there is no denying my love for the place. It is nothing more than an eleven-mile length of raised glacial till, built up with homes for about ten-thousand people.

The western edge is all sandy beach and rock pools that dip away into the Irish sea, and each tip is home to dunes and salt-marsh, and nature
reserves. There are natterjack toads and Walney geraniums, the place is unique. And it is here that I chose to set my first novel.

Walking on the island takes me back to the sweltering summer of nineteen-seventy-six, to days full of sea-light and learning about the quirky nature of islanders. Seaview House is built around the lives of two characters: Stoney, who is a mix of every island lad I ever knew, and Jill, who has a brief taste of island life and can never leave it behind.

There is no Seaview House, though. That place comes entirely from my
imagination but is inspired by the plethora of Victorian houses on the mainland. Many are crumbling now. There is no local money available for restoration, nor government funding in this era of austerity. A lot of my time is spent wandering through the faded Victoriana that is Barrow-in-Furness, inventing stories about the buildings I see.

Seaview House is a tale of buried secrets and a thirty-year-old body which reveals the final and most startling secret of them all.