With her first young adult novel, The Flower King, British author Lesley Howarth made it to several shortlists for fiction awards. With her second book, MapHead, she served up a fictional brew that "one only occasionally happens upon," according to Robyn Sheahan in a cover story in Magpies. Sheahan went on to note that Howarth writes the sort of book that "is respectful of its readers' imaginative and intellectual capabilities, and which offers real insights into the difficult business of growing up." Howarth herself was coming of age as a writer with these first published books and has since broadened her fictional universe to encompass not only a turn-of-the-century world filled with flowers and a modern country town with alien visitors in its midst, but also a wind farm in the near future in Weather Eye, and the chilly world of prehistory in The Pits, a story of...