ASTONISHINGLY for a new writer, Annabel Pitcher found herself at the centre of a bidding war for the rights to her first novel My Sister Lives On The Mantelpiece.
No-one was more surprised than she to be told that her story of a family riven apart by grief following a terrorist attack was going to be big.
"I thought it might get published and earn a few hundred pounds, but I certainly didn’t expect the response I got," she said.
Although she won’t reveal how much she was paid as an advance, it’s probably fair to say that she must have felt as if she’d hit the jackpot. She was certainly thrilled.
Within a few short weeks of submitting the manuscript to an agent, the 28-year-old Oxford graduate, who was brought up in Netherthong, found herself resigning from her job as a teacher at Wakefield Girls High School to become a full-time writer.
"I’ve gone from being in a packed classroom, in control of 30 teenagers, to sitting in a room on my own writing," she says.
"I was really sad to leave teaching but I do love writing and it’s been like a dream come true."
The book, published this week, is being described by the publishers Orion as ‘an accomplished and deeply involving debut for readers in their teens and far beyond’. There are high hopes that it will make Annabel Pitcher a household name. The rights for American and foreign language editions have been sold separately.
While the story, told in the first person by a 10-year-old boy whose sister is killed in a terrorist bombing, is exciting, emotional and punchy, the tale behind how it was written is almost as fascinating.
Annabel, who is an English graduate, was on a year-long honeymoon with her husband Steve, a language teacher, travelling the world, when the germ of an idea for a novel came to her. "We had arrived in Ecuador late at night and couldn’t sleep because we were jet lagged," she explained.
"It was our first stop in South America and it was too late to go out so we watched an English DVD, United 93, about 9/11. It got me thinking about terrorism and what happens after an attack.
"Most of us come to terms with it and move on but I started to think about the families who have lost someone and are never going to be able to do that."
And so Annabel began to fill notebooks with her ideas and by the time the couple returned to England after travelling around South America, the Far East, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and the Middle East she had a working novel.
"The central character Jamie just dropped into my head," she says. "He doesn’t really remember his sister and doesn’t understand how her death has affected the family. It’s told from his point of view."