James Lovegrove – author

Cold Keep came about largely because I wanted to write a story with a tough, resourceful young female protagonist and because the title, which popped into my head one morning, was just too good not to have a tale attached to it. I wasn’t sure that the setting (an isolated fortress city shivering in the arctic wastes of a post-new-Ice-Age world) was going to work, until I came up with the idea of the heroine, Yana, having a weapon that applied uniquely to her environment: an axe made of solid ice. Once that was there, everything else fell into place.

It was only after the book was plotted that I saw the movie The Village and realised there were certain superficial similarities between the two. I decided to press ahead anyway, because (a) nobody has a monopoly on ideas, and (b) I had the idea first. So there, M. Night Shyamalamadingdong!

Amazon UK:

• Cold Keep [Barrington Stoke, January 2006] – ISBN 978-1842993637