The Secret of Golden Island by Natasha Farrant

Those of us with a passion for books and reading for pleasure will take solace in the blog from Natasha Farrant. We need to promote reading for pleasure more than ever- we couldn’t agree more.

Usually, when I write posts around publication of a new book, I want to be upbeat -confident, enthusiastic. But at the moment, in all honesty, I am troubled.

A little first on the new book. THE SECRET OF GOLDEN ISLAND is the story of two children who enter a competition together to win a tiny private island. Yakov, who has fled to England from a warzone, wants a safe space for his family. Skylar believes winning the island will help her beloved Grandpa recover from his stroke. The story is full of intrigue, danger and excitement. At its heart, it’s about serious issues, but it reads like an adventure story.

This is what I write – what I love writing.

Children, like adults, suffer in our troubled world. I write stories which acknowledge this, with truth and realism but also with gentleness, empathy and hope. But just as importantly I aim to write a cracking adventure which will make them fall in love with reading. Because the solace that reading brings isn’t always the subject matter, but the act of reading itself.

I wrote GOLDEN ISLAND in the months preceding and following the death of my father. Writing made the grief I felt bearable, but so too did reading. Agatha Christie, Jane Gardam, Patrick Gale, Barbara Kingsolver, Dickens… It wasn’t so much what they wrote. More that their stories poured into the gaping hole of Dad’s absence, and helped to make me whole again.

Which brings me back to why I’m troubled.

Because we know that children aren’t reading as they used to. We understand the causes – smartphones, the pandemic, library closures. But our children deserve better than this. These glorious worlds of adventure, mystery, romance, parallel universes, dragons, time travel, possibilities, these worlds which can help them grow, learn, be strong, which should be theirs for the taking, are going undiscovered…

I keep asking myself: what can I do?

What I can. The chapters of the new book are shorter than previous ones, every word and sentence more carefully weighed. For the next few weeks, I will be talking to children up and down the country about reading. Really, it’s just an intensification of what I’ve always done, but now there’s a new urgency to it. Because this is what troubles me, grandiose as it may seem: if our imagination is one of the key human qualities that separate us from machines, and reading is the best way to flex that imagination, in an age dominated by AI what happens to us if we stop?

I wish there were a wider national conversation about falling literacy levels. I long for a bold government initiative to promote reading for pleasure. But I’ll end this piece by saluting the great work that the FCBG do, as well as all the other fantastic literacy organisations, charities, libraries, teachers, writers, storytellers, who work so hard to promote a love of reading. They are needed more than ever, because together we carry a huge responsibility – not only for our children’s wellbeing and imagination, but for our common future.