Alex, why the Isle of Man?

That’s an easy first one. Besides it’s my home and it’s where I was brought up, anybody from the Isle of Man knows a lot of the stories and a lot of the folklore of their home, and it seemed like such a logical idea to bring a number of the stories together and use them as a backdrop to my own story.

What was the inspiration behind the book?

I think it was firstly people like Sophia Morrison who were collecting the stories in the early nineteen hundreds and publishing them. Besides that it was really just a way for me to indulge in my own love of this sort of fiction. I grew up loving Tolkien and fantasy films and fiction and it was a good way to come up with my own.

What are you proudest of?

Other than bringing the book out! Moments in it which picture perfectly what was in my mind, so maybe Teeval the princess of the ocean, when you first see her, it was exactly as I saw it in my mind, or the locals you meet along the way setting the tone that I wanted to achieve.

Has anything changed since you started writing the book?

A lot has changed. It will have been just over four years since I started writing it to its publication. The style has changed gradually, when I first started writing it Bea learned to speak English because he had a wireless radio in his cave and he loved Elvis Presley music! I’m quite glad those are ideas I thought better of.

And finally what sort of book did you want it to be?

I wanted it to be the type of book that I would want to read, a book with which you could loose yourself in mysteries and adventures and wrap up in a blanket in front of fire and get excited about and be moved by.