Maddy Smith was born with a rusty-coloured ruinmark on her hand – a symbol of the old gods and definitely cause for suspicion. For magic is dangerous. Or so everyone thinks. But Maddy enjoys working magic. Even if it is just to control some pesky goblins. And every time her friend, One-Eye - a good-for-nowt Outlander - comes by, he teaches her more and more about the gods and the runes.

Joanne Harris writes....

Runemarks goes back a long, long way. My first full-length try at a novel was a sprawling 1000-page monster (with illustrations) called Witchlight, written when I was nineteen and rejected by every publisher I sent it to on account of its length, its complexity and the darkness of its imagery.

In many ways, Witchlight was the prototype of Runemarks. It was set in the same place, the valley of the Strond. Its heroine was also called Maddy, she had a sister called Mae, a goblin friend (whose name, like that of Sugar-and-Sack, was taken from accounts of the Pendle witch trials) and most of the action went on in World Below - but Runemarks goes back even longer than that.

Anyone who remembers me from school will probably tell you that I was always doodling in class; but instead of just drawing random stuff in the margins of my rough books, my doodles took the form of long, complicated comic-strips - inspired, I think, from Astérix, but often starring Norse gods. Why Norse gods? Well, I’d always been interested in mythology. I started off with the Greeks and the Romans, but found the Norse tales more attractive somehow, funnier and more human and hugely more dramatic. The only problem was; there weren’t enough of them. No-one had written them down at the time, and the fullest accounts came from Christian chroniclers centuries later, and were at best, incomplete, and at worst, badly distorted.

The solution was simple, I thought. Write more. And so I did; I took the characters I liked best from the Norse pantheon and wrote my own versions of their stories. Fanfic, you’d call it – or godfic, I guess. The original material was sketchy enough for me to allow full rein to my imagination, and I wrote hundreds of adventures – many of them in comic-strip form – in a series of school exercise books. In these early versions, Loki is a youthful skateboarder (and has much in common with a certain Bart Simpson yet to come); Frigg is enormously fat; Balder the Beautiful is (of course) bald; Idun is a kind of New Age hippie chick and Thor is just like Desperate Dan; huge, bearded and not very bright.

Of course, according to Voluspá (the Prophecy of the Seeress), the gods are all doomed to die at Ragnarók, the end of the world. That didn’t stop me wanting more. So I created for myself an imaginary universe, based on that of the Norse legends, but a world post-Ragnarók, in which the Prophecy of the Seeress has been revealed to be as inaccurate as those Christian re-tellings of the old tales.

In this world, the gods have survived, although their powers are much reduced, and they live on Earth (and sometimes under it), occasionally battling other gods, fighting giants and quarrelling among themselves.

It’s an idea that never quite left me alone.

Four or five years ago, I dragged the manuscript of Witchlight out of its drawer and read it aloud to my daughter, Anouchka. She loved it so much that I started another one, a story for just Anouchka and me, just for fun, and I read it to her chapter by chapter, working on it in what free time I had left from my “adult” novels. I called it Runemarks, and for a long time I kept it a secret between Anouchka and me. It felt like playing truant, somehow; and besides, I was enjoying it so much – and so was she – that to tell my publishers about it would have spoilt the fun. But Anouchka wouldn’t let it go. Having thoroughly overseen the creative process – she was my first and toughest editor, saying; more of this, please, and; NO! You can’t kill X -! - she now urged me to publish the book – in fact, she wanted me to write a whole series of books about Maddy and her friends – and in the end I gave it a try …

Funny, how these things happen. I was fourteen when all this began. Now my daughter’s the same age. And of all the books I’ve written so far, this one has been the most fun to write.