Alex Scarrow

Ten years as a rock guitarist, then graphic design, then video games: Alex Scarrow worked on Waterworld, Evolva, The Thing and Legion Arena before he wrote a novel. A Thousand Suns, published in 2006, started life as a screenplay he could not place. It runs on two clocks, April 1945 and the present day, and turns on a captured American bomber sent on a one-way flight across the Atlantic and a wreck found decades later off the Rhode Island coast with the secret still inside it. The Candle Man, from 2012, is framed by a man shut in a room aboard the Titanic in 1912 telling a young girl how he came to be there, then works back into Whitechapel in 1888 and offers a fresh explanation for the killings of that autumn. Scarrow was born in Norwich in 1966 and still lives there; his brother is the Roman novelist Simon Scarrow. Younger readers know him for TimeRiders, nine books for Puffin.