As announced in The Bookseller today, I’m thrilled to finally reveal that my third novel, The Dollmaker, will be published by riverrun/Quercus in March of next year.

To say I’m delighted would be a massive understatement. My editor Jon Riley has been championing the book from the moment he read the manuscript, and the entire team at riverrun have been fantastically supportive right through the editorial process. I feel very lucky indeed to have landed among such enthusiastic and knowledgeable people. Their love for books has been evident in every meeting I’ve had with them. As I said in my statement for The Bookseller, I honestly cannot think of a better home for The Dollmaker than riverrun.

I’ll have more – much more – to tell you about the novel as we get closer to publication, but for the moment I just want to say that The Dollmaker is particularly close to my heart, perhaps because it’s been with me for such a long time. The dollmaker himself (well, one of them…) first appeared in my mind more than ten years ago, while I was still living and working in Exeter. I wrote an outline for what was always and immediately ‘his’ novel. Other things happened, other stories intervened – but I never forgot Andrew Garvie, and when I finally came back to work on the manuscript properly towards the end of 2016 I found his character and his story more compelling than ever. The Dollmaker has always been a book I needed to write, and here it is. I hope readers will fall for Andrew, just as I did.