My name is Julia.
This is the story of the summer I spent living in a lighthouse.
The summer I almost lost my mum, and found a shark older than trees.
Don’t worry though, that doesn’t spoil the ending …
Julia has followed her mum and dad to live on a remote island for the summer – her dad, for work; her mother, on a determined mission to find the elusive Greenland shark. But when her mother’s obsession threatens to submerge them all, Julia finds herself on an adventure with dark depths and a lighthouse full of hope…
A beautiful and uplifting story about a mother, a daughter, and love – with timely themes of the importance of science and the environment.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston met in 2009, when Kiran was a student and Tom was artist-in-residence at Cambridge University. They have been a couple and collaborators ever since, but Julia and the Shark was their first novel. It was Indie Book of the Month, Scottish Booktrust Book of the Month, and won the Waterstones Children’s Gift of the Year 2021. Kiran is the award-winning, bestselling author of stories including The Girl of Ink & Stars and The Deathless Girls, and Tom worked as an acclaimed artist for many years, making his illustrative debut with Julia and the Shark, and his writing debut with Wreck (Granta, 2022). They live in Oxford with their cats Luna and Marley, in a house between a river and a forest.