The Shellfish Nest is about the seaside and the imagination, about working out where you begin and the world ends (or vice versa), about harming yourself and finding yourself, about finding nests and naming them, about good trips and bad, about pirates’ treasure … in short, about all the things any real story is ever about.
It was first written for a very young reader, but she was quite a bit older by the time it was finished, and the age of both the heroine and the intended reader grew and became vaguer towards the 18th chapter. You can read a bit more about how it came about via my newsletter here.
I’m grateful to Stefan for the beautiful cover that captures the feel of the story so well.
You can buy it as an ebook or paperback on Amazon UK or US (or search for “troscianko shellfish nest” on any other marketplace).
If you read it, I’d love to know what you think, via an Amazon review or my contact form.
In the meantime, here’s a little taster.
Chapter 1
Once upon a time there was a girl called Selena. She lived in a pretty pebbledash house with lots of other humans and cats of different sizes and a view of the sea. She went to school and she went to the shops and she went to the park and to her friends’ houses and to the beach, and sometimes, when she didn’t want to be with all the humans or even the cats any more, she went to a secret hiding place she had found for herself, or maybe made for herself, called the Shellfish Nest.
One of the reasons she liked the Shellfish Nest so much was because it was such a tongue-twister to say. Sometimes even when she was only thinking about the Shellfish Nest she would get her sh’s and her s’s muddled up in her head, and that made her smile. Then she would whisper Shellfish Nest Shellfish Nest Shellfish Nest under her breath to herself as fast as she could until she tripped and tumbled over the words and made herself laugh. Another reason she liked the Shellfish Nest was that she had never spoken those two words aloud to another human being. She thought maybe no one in the whole history of the world had ever put those two words next to each other. She liked the idea that she had made the Shellfish Nest exist when it didn’t use to exist, and that she had also made the whole idea of the Shellfish Nest exist. Long in the future when she died, she would know that without her, the world would never have had the Shellfish Nest.
She also liked her path to get to the Shellfish Nest. To get to the Shellfish Nest, which no one else in the whole wide world knew existed or even knew could exist, she walked—or ran—out of the house and down the road and along another road and onto the beach. And then she walked along the beach, all the way along, in the soft dry sand at the top if the tide was in, or in the squidgy wet sand in the middle if the tide was out. Then she followed her favourite route through the rocks at the end of the beach. These were rocks that at the top turned into tall cliffs with tiny little trees clinging on in small cracks, and at the bottom stuck far out into the ocean.
Selena started on the little slithery rocks that grew out of the sand, picking her way confidently through the slimy strands of seaweed and the shiny rockpools, because she knew by now exactly where to find the nice stable barnacly rocks that her shoes could grip onto, and she liked to race herself along the rocks and up to where the rocks turned into the cliff, seeing whether she could make her pauses to look for the next safe rock even shorter than the last time. And when she got to the place that was half rock, half cliff, she had to slow down, and find her favourite handhold, and reach up with one hand, and then reach up with the other foot to find her favourite foothold, where there was just enough space for the front of her shoe to grip onto the half-rock-half-cliff so she could pull herself up just high enough to get her other foot to the nice wide ledge where she could slither along until she got to her next favourite handhold.
And by the time she was high enough that the slimy seaweed had stopped long ago and the little tufts of grasses and flowers had started a little while ago, the Shellfish Nest wasn’t far away. But there were still three disguises you had to get past to find it, and Selena thought that even if another human did decide to come all this way along the beach and through the rocks and up the cliff, they probably wouldn’t think to look for the trick.
As she climbed, she remembered the first time she had come up this far and this high away from the people down on the beach, when she got tired of trying to keep the rising tide from flattening her sea wall in the sand, and the grownups were either reading or else dozing behind their books and sunglasses.
That first time, she didn’t know her favourite path over the rocks, and she didn’t know whether there would even be enough handholds and footholds to climb up the cliff, and she did know that she would be in trouble if anyone saw her coming up this high with no one to help her if she lost her footing. Twice, when it was time to reach up with her knee and her foot to find the next little crevice in the rock face, she changed her mind and reached back down to the one before. She wasn’t sure whether she did this because she was scared to go on or because she wanted to sensibly test out whether she could still get back down. She decided it was because she was being sensible.
…
Emily T. Troscianko 