Julie Walker Author

Slipped – what a strange title for a novel, you might be thinking! How and why did the author come up with this story, contemporary fiction with a dash of mystical realism? Read on…

Some of you may remember the Great Storm of October 1987 in the UK. Michael Fish, the weatherman of the day gained notoriety for proclaiming that we wouldn’t have a hurricane. At the time I was heavily pregnant, and we lived in a flat. I thought a branch had come passed the window, in fact it was a tree!

Fast forward now to a conversation that I had with my best friend and my sister. Two separate conversations with the same outcome. We had all been pregnant at the time, all three of us had girls. The conversations that we had were about how we felt there was something ‘special’ about our girls, but we couldn’t give a definitive answer as to why.

The germ of an idea came to me then.

What if the fictional girls were born on that night and their fictional fathers passed away at the same time… What would be special about them?… How about if they disappeared- slipped – every full moon and were able to meet their fathers for ten minutes? (I’m fascinated about the moon).

What would their grieving mothers do? Would they keep the secret? How would it affect all their lives? What was the point of it all?

I’m not a plotter so I had no idea how it would end.

How it actually ended needed a sequel, and hopefully you’ll read it in 2025.