Once I lived the quiet life,
Mine, the straight and narrow way;
Not for me a world of strife,
Gentle, all the livelong day.
Then, from the South, a witch did come,
Over land and over sea,
And though this could not be, said some,
Come she did – and she came for me.
Peter Garvey, age 50
I am currently well underway with writing my first novel, ‘The Name of the Witch’ – my most ambitious project so far. This is a story within a story and is aimed at the young adult market and older.
The story centres around fifteen-year-old Peter Garvey, a very bright boy, but he lacks confidence and is occasionally picked on at school. As a result he keeps his head down and has become a bit of a loner, with only two close friends, bespectacled Dibble, and Rosa who was born in Northern Spain.
At the beginning of the story a young child goes missing from the common, close to where Peter lives, and her mother is found wandering, blind and totally deranged. The police and the doctors are left completely baffled and from that point on Peter’s life begins to change out of all recognition.
An unfortunate run-in with Selby, the vicious school bully, leads Peter to a startling find near the crime scene and, from here on, he finds himself drawn inexorably into a strange and frightening parallel world of dark and sinister forces, of magical and scheming fairies and a demented and terrifying witch from far across the sea who exists only for their complete annihilation. Peter becomes inescapably drawn into this conflict and is presented with no choice but to try to resolve both the tangled mystery of the missing toddler and to confront the witch, a seemingly hopeless task which will eventually take him and his friends to the wild and windswept cliffs of Galicia in the far north west of Spain.