Officially released today by Little Island, Wildlord is a “suspenseful teen fantasy about young love, dark mystery and magic”. 

Author Philip Womack  has always been fascinated by pre-history, when looking at the many burial mounds that scatter the Suffolk countryside, it wasn’t hard for him to imagine them being inhabited by other-worldly beings. The fact that they contained ancient warriors sparked his imagination further. They exist on the borderlands of history and myth, with the past reaching out into the present operating somewhere between shadow and light. Similar to the Sidhe, which in Irish folklore are occupied by the Aos Si, the mounds in Wildlord are the home to the Samdhya, or the Wildmark.

The protagonist, Tom, is a lonely teenage orphan who’s parents died when he was young. His guardian is away one year, so instead of returning home from the boarding school he attends, he has to stay there for the holidays. And this is when the adventure begins…

This book was very much influenced by Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, which includes a potent sense of what being a teenager is, on the cusp of adulthood and growing into yourself and your powers, and Ursula Le Guin’s Ged, a teenage wizard  who battles his own shadow self in A Wizard of Earthsea. A style of book which Philip feels is going out of fashion with teens, and one that he hopes to keep alive, and keep both the books that influenced him in view.

Layers of landscape, memory, folklore, literature and history are inscribed into a tale about a teen boy facing up to horrors he never dreamed of.