Phoenix Rising
Author: Bryony Pearce
Publication Date: June 1st 2015
Publisher: Stripes Publishing
#BansheeCrew
In a future world where fossil fuels have run out and democracy has collapsed, an outlawed pirate crew fight for survival on their ship, the Phoenix, kept afloat by whatever they can salvage or scavenge on the debris-filled seas. Toby has never known anything other than life onboard the Phoenix and he's desperate for adventure. But when trouble comes hunting the Phoenix down, Toby realizes that what you wish for isn't always what you want. He meets beautiful Ayla from the Banshee, a rival pirate ship and sworn enemy of the Phoenix, and his world is thrown into disorder. How can he know who to trust and what to believe? The future rests on him making an impossible choice...A gripping novel, perfect for fans of Anthony Horowitz, Eoin Colfer and Suzanne Collins
Ending the World
For me, one of the most fun
things about being a writer is building the world and the characters that live
in it.
In the case of Phoenix Rising, it
wasn't so much building a world, as ending and then rebuilding it.
So I set out to think about how
the world might end.
By the ‘end of the world’ of
course I mean the ‘end of civilisation as we know it’. A literal earth
shattering event like a meteor strike or the explosion of the sun (which is a
favourite suggestion in school visits) would not leave me much scope for
developing characters and a world in which to write a story afterwards. So I
needed an event that would kill off most
of the people and change the world itself, but not so serious that my main
characters could not survive and have adventures.
This is something that, as an
imaginative individual with a propensity towards the macabre, I have considered
many times over the course of my lifetime.
