Letters from the Lighthouse (Paperback)

Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month for May (2017)

We weren't supposed to be going to the pictures that night. We weren't even meant to be outside, not in a blackout, and definitely not when German bombs had been falling on London all month like pennies from a jar.

February, 1941.

After months of bombing raids in London, twelve-year-old Olive Bradshaw and her little brother Cliff are evacuated to the Devon coast. The only person with two spare beds is Mr Ephraim, the local lighthouse keeper. But he's not used to company and he certainly doesn't want any evacuees.

Desperate to be helpful, Olive becomes his post-girl, carrying secret messages (as she likes to think of the letters) to the villagers. But Olive has a secret of her own. Her older sister Sukie went missing in an air raid, and she's desperate to discover what happened to her.

Then she finds a strange coded note – a note that changes everything and which seems to link Sukie to Devon, and to something dark and impossibly dangerous.

Emma Carroll has been steadily carving a niche as a writer of evocative and spine-tingling children’s fiction, justifiably earning her writing comparisons not only with classic Children’s writers including Joan Aiken but also the ghost stories of Susan Hill.  Her prize-winning fiction includes Frost Hollow Hall (Longlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize), The Girl Who Walked on Air, In Darkling Wood, Strange Star and Letters from the Lighthouse.