Alison Moore’s short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror and Best New Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Her first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Recent publications include a series for children.

Praise for Alison Moore

‘Moore is a serious talent. There’s art here. There’s care.’ —Sam Leith, The Financial Times

★★★★★ ‘Moore’s masterful blend of genres and influences makes her third novel feel, as many great novels do, quite unlike anything else I’ve read. In entwining Bonnie and Sylvia’s tales, Death and the Seaside delves deep into its characters’ psyches; the result is quiet and brilliant, unsettling yet thoughtful, dreamlike and thrilling.’ —Blair Rose, Nudge

‘Moore’s writing is beautiful and precise.’ —SJ Watson

‘She is both gifted stylist and talented creator of a new English grotesque.’ —Isabel Berwick, Financial Times

‘He Wants will easily be one of my books of the year... He Wants left me feeling both completely uplifted and utterly devastated, all at once.’ —Simon Savidge, Savidge Reads

‘Alison Moore is very good on modern alienation... She doesn’t so much lay bare a life as shine blinding pinpricks into its darkest corners.’ —Claire Allfree, Metro

‘Brave and rigorous.’ —Rachel Cusk, The Guardian

‘Moore movingly mines the aching gap between aspiration and actuality.’ —Anita Sethi, The Observer

Praise for Alison Moore’s Children’s Fiction

‘Moore’s charming novel, skilfully illustrated by Collins, is about an antique shop whose furniture is haunted by ghosts with unfulfilled dreams and the boy who befriends them.’ —Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

★★★★★ ‘The plot moves along quickly, and once Sunny finds one ghost, more seem to appear every day, popping up in all sorts of odd places around the shop. It's all jolly, apart from the puzzle of who, or what, is behind the trouble in the shop. Sunny's parents seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and don't blame him for it, but I'm not sure they really believe his tale of ghosts either. With a little help from his spectral friends though Sunny manages to track down the trouble maker, and find a way to settle the problem. Further stories are planned so this looks like being the beginning of quite an adventure for Sunny and the Ghosts.’ —Our Book Reviews

‘The story is set in an old junk shop in Devon stuffed with more than its fair share of ghosts, who arrive, wistfully attached to the bric-a-brac, in the state in which they died. There’s pyjama-clad Herbert; Walter, a miner who never learned to read (Sunny teaches him); Violet, who’s writing a novel (in a meta-literary touch, it turns out to be Sunny and the Ghosts); and many others, including a mischief-maker who fills the shop with cats. This is a gentle, intelligent and warm novel about friendship and imagination for children of seven and up.’ —Philip Womack, Literary Review