The Seamaiden's Odyssey

A strange and beautiful sea-creature is brought into the marine sanctuary where Sasha works. The sea-girl is kept as an exhibit and for scientific research. But Sasha wants to know more about her – are there more of her kind? What sort of community does she come from? Does she have a family? There is a story to be told, in exchange for a promise. It is a story of cruelty and grief, of love and longing and pride; the story of Merryn, who makes a traumatic journey from sea and to land, from defiance to finding her true self and the power of sisterhood. This new fable is from twice Carnegie Medal-winning author, Berlie Doherty. She draws on the folklore of ocean and landscape and, in the language of our oldest tales, weaves the traditional into our modern preoccupations. Powerful ink and silhouette illustrations by Tamsin Rosewell brighten the tale with a vibrant but classical language of visual storytelling. Rosewell draws on the long heritage of silhouette and paper-cut work for her inspiration and adds it to her well-known boldness with colour and structure. AGES: 10 to 16 AUTHOR: Berlie Doherty is the author of the best-selling novel, Street Child, and over 60 more books for children, teenagers and adults, and has written many plays for radio, theatre and television. She has been translated into over twenty languages and has won many awards, including the Carnegie medal for both Granny Was a Buffer Girl and Dear Nobody, and the Writers' Guild Award for both Daughter of the Sea and the theatre version of Dear Nobody. She has three children and seven grandchildren, and lives in the Derbyshire Peak District.

About the Author :
Berlie Doherty is the author of the best-selling novel, Street Child, and over 60 more books for children, teenagers and adults, and has written many plays for radio, theatre and television. She has been translated into over twenty languages and has won many awards, including the Carnegie medal for both Granny Was a Buffer Girl and Dear Nobody, and the Writers’ Guild Award for both Daughter of the Sea and the theatre version of Dear Nobody. She has three children and seven grandchildren, and lives in the Derbyshire Peak District.  Tamsin Rosewell is an artist, historian, broadcaster and bookseller. After 15 years working both in Parliament as a researcher and for the British Government on Whitehall as a Civil Servant, she joined the team at English Heritage working at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. She has also worked at Coventry Cathedral, leading tours of a site on which everything from the Anglo Saxon landscape, through to the art of John Piper and Dame Elizabeth Fink is interesting and historically important. Tamsin hosted the Folk Show for Radio Warwickshire for three years, covering areas of folklore in music as well as tackling themes such as songs written during and about war time, political folk songs and the portrayal of religion and belief in song. She wrote and presented a three part series about the work of William Blake for Resonance FM in 2015. Her latest documentary series is about the history of the idea of apocalypse, also written and produced for Resonance FM. When she is not broadcasting, lecturing or painting Tamsin works for 50 year-old independent bookshop, Kenilworth Books as a bookseller and review writer. She also lectures on the History of Ghostlore, The History of Chocolate (having trained as a chocolatier while living in Belgium) and on Elizabethan Horticulture and Gardens. She works mainly in ink on canvas, and owns the most spectacular collection of inks and liquid pigments from all over the world. But she has been known to just use a pencil.