Brainchild by Ivor Baddiel

Ivor Baddiel joins us on the blog today sharing insight into his book, Brainchild.

 

 

I have a book coming out on September 22nd, Brainchild. It’s a thriller for 10–15-year-olds, and it is co-authored by Jonny Zucker. The thing is, Jonny sadly passed away in 2016, so, I guess you’re thinking, how is this possible?

Jonny was a prolific children’s author of somewhere in the region of 50 books. I’d known him since we were kids and, once I took the plunge and became a writer myself, we teamed up and did pretty well. We wrote five books together, one for children and four humorous adult titles. I’m not sure any of them made a dent in the top ten, but actually the children’s book, Mystical Magic for Scholastic’s The Knowledge series, has been translated into a fair few languages and for a while was given out as part of a goody bag on BA flights – there’s a sales avenue I didn’t see coming.

So, we were doing okay and had a good working relationship. Jonny was a funny, excitable bundle of creativity and ideas, and when he said he’d been looking at children’s thrillers and suggested we write one – well, he actually said the others were rubbish and we could definitely write a better one that would sell millions, as I said, he was quite excitable – I was happy to give it a go.

And give it a go we did. We came up with the basic idea – a brain being grown in a lab and looked after by 14-year-old twins splits into good and evil halves, one of which, the

evil one, is stolen – and set about plotting it out and writing it.

It wasn’t easy, no book ever is, but this involved making sure everything made sense, the pacing was right, nothing was given away too soon and so on. We enjoyed the process though and had a decent draft written when tragedy struck.

It was heartbreaking and shocking and hard, really hard, and inevitably, the project took a back seat, where it stayed for a few years. Then, a couple of years ago I looked at it again and, pleasingly, I still thought it was good, so I set about completing it.

It was a strange process, in some sections of what had been written Jonny’s voice came through strongly, and that felt both good, and sad and unsettling, but knowing how much he believed in the project and wanted to see it out there, helped drive me on and eventually I finished it.

Now, thanks to the blessing of Jonny’s family and Purple Mash publishing, a company Jonny also worked for, it will indeed be, ‘out there.’

I hope Jonny would have been happy with it, I’m pretty sure he would have been, in my opinion, and I’m not in any way biased, it’s great and looks fantastic.

Most importantly though, I hope lots of children read it and enjoy it. Jonny was passionate about children’s reading

and if our book does that, gets young people reading in a world where sadly, they are reading less and less, then our latest collaboration will have been a great success. As for it selling millions, who knows…but I’d settle for sales of few hundred thousand.

 

Brainchild by Ivor Baddiel and Johnny Zucker is published on 22nd September 2025. It is the first title to include a page dedicated to Children’s Book Project, a charity that donates books to underprivileged children.