Elizabeth Knox is one of my very favourite writers. I read The Vintner’s Luck when I was young and it changed me. It is a novel that I love most above almost all other books (the other ones close to it are Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which also changed me; and The Northern Lights series by Philip Pullman). It’s Elizabeth’s worldbuilding paper that catalysed my fever for writing. For a long time I’d pushed my stories to the back of my mind but from 2019 when I was lucky to be in a class with other writers and Elizabeth leading and teaching us, I was hooked. Elizabeth’s extraordinary craft and imagination was so infectious and inspiring. So to have Elizabeth help me with my book and then launch the final version was simply magical. A dream! I never would ever have imagined when I read The Vintner’s Luck all those years ago (and then Dreamhunter and Dreamquake, and Billie’s Kiss, and Wake!). Here is Elizabeth’s speech which, as they say, goes straight to the pool room.

Elizabeth Knox’s launch speech for The Raven’s Eye Runaways.

I remember being very pleased when Claire signed up for my Worldbuilding course in 2019. It was wonderful to watch someone steeped in reading and with such broad and fully formed tastes dive into the discipline of telling a story, and accommodating the storytelling of others, since that's how my course works. During that year I discovered two new and amazing things about Claire. One was that, as a writer, she learned really fast. She did some of the fastest learning I've ever seen. And the other is that she had an excellent ear. Her sentences were straight away limpidly clear and lovely.

Which brings me to this novel—The Raven’s Eye Runaways. I've read it many times now, and it is ever fresh and full of energy. A joy to read—to hear. A story for readers of an age where it's perfectly acceptable to terrify them so long as you now and then comfort them along the way, and ultimately. Claire gives comfort in the form of the friendship of the characters young and old, her belief in parental bonds, her conviction that good people working very hard in bad times can always find a way forward, and her belief in the magic of the written word. It didn't take any convincing me of her book’s particular ingenious take on that.

For all that the novel’s story is substantially about belief—bad, prejudiced, and twisted beliefs, and beliefs that are bridges to better worlds, it doesn’t build its arguments with ideas, it builds them with observation and poetry. Hand in hand with the novel's thoughts about ideas, faith, knowledge and stories is an exactly realised enchantment with the material world. Claire loves figurative language and uses it as invocation—magical invocation—and also to move the story briskly along. Her imagery performs its trick of compressing information, observations and ideas, not making them denser but adding gravity. Nothing is laboured, it's all light and natural. So—this is one of those books for younger readers that describes appetising food, and getting warm when you're cold, and getting cool when you're hot, and feeling safe when you have felt afraid. It puts its readers inside living bodies in a lively world. At the same time it manages is to be pretty bloodly scary and disturbing in places! It has some very good villains, whose villainy isn't just a matter of character but of what kinds of world they want and what kinds of actions they’ll take or tolerate to make that world real and adamant and all-encompassing.

The Raven's Eye Runaways is a novel whose principal characters are a bookbinder and a scribe, a book set in a world where people aren't just discouraged from reading, but forbidden books. The bone this story is gnawing on is who owns knowledge, and what gets counted as knowledge. A novel where those who have intuitive understandings of how things work and inquiring minds are likely to be labelled troublemakers. People who think about the wrong things in the wrong way with the wrong values and contrary to what everyone sensible understands. Which brings to mind the dead rat the people in power now keep putting on our plates.

Villain Carver is a kind of priestess of the Stationer’s Guild, the people in charge of the dissemination but actually the hoarding of knowledge. She not a grim villain but a theatrically expressive, temper tantrum throwing, eating the scenery kind of villain. A kid’s book classic and a hell of a lot of fun. I think Claire was channelling Roald Dahl when she invented pitiable but scary Carver. The heroes in this book can be scary too. The Woodess, a deity of a sort and a force for good first appears creepily talking in what sounds like promotional material for eco burials. The Woodess may be good for the heroes to have on their side, but she’s signally lacking in milk of human kindness. I read her as the necessary evolution of good in evil times, good that might eat you alive if you don't do what's good.

The novel’s engine is its great friendships. Principally the friendship that forms between the lonely, exploited, perpetually drugged Lea, whose been locked up in Missel House, learning to transcribe books—transcribe not read—and promised a part in a glorious book-making project, the aim of which is actually like the Skekis's use for the Podlings in Jim Hensen's The Dark Crystal. Lea finds Getwin, the daughter of the bookbinder at the ravens eye book bindary. And Buckle, Getwin’s childhood friend. There’s some astute stuff about new and old friendships, and the adjustments required. Buckle is always slightly on the back foot with his friend, which makes better sense to him when Lea arrives. Getwin is admirable and sympathetic, but one of the most prickly and reactive heroes I've come across. This reader found Getwin’s pricklyness cathartic. Claire can really do youthful turmoil, especially a child's resentment about being kept in the dark by high-handed adults ‘protecting’ her from things.

I loved spending time with these people, rushing about deeply emergive landscapes and townscapes with the young heroes, and believably imperfect parental characters, scenery munching villains, and daunting deities. Some of it—landscapes, townscapes, action, seen through the aerial view of Sharp, the one eyed raven the book bindery is named for—excellent use of eye-of-God there Claire. I loved spending time in the homes this book creates. The bookbindery with its thingyness of craft and industry. Missal House with its sinister disappearances and weird routines; Lea's only home which she aches for once she's run away from it. This book does homesickness, and the thrill of making a getaway, crossing country and discovering new vistas, and action, and drama and purpose.

The Raven's Eye Runaways is enormously enjoyable, relevant and meaningful without ever being pushy or heavy about what it does. It's a bright, burning, sunny, funny, serious work, and I can't wait to read the next one.