The sheer imaginative audacity of The Innocent’s Story propels it beyond anything expected. Blown up in a terrorist bomb, Cassina returns as a para-spirit able to live in the body of anyone alive. Experiencing her parents’ emotions from within the brain is distressing, seeing the world from the viewpoint of an anxious bigot is irritating and depressing but finding herself knowing what a terrorist bomber is going to do next is terrifying. Cassina’s unusual view of the world is a roller-coaster of emotions. It’s also a chance to explore some of the reasons why people do terrible things.
en Cassina is blown-up by a suicide bomber in a station in England, life as she knows it is over. Except that she doesn't die. And - miraculously - neither does the bomber. Cassina survives as something that can live in the heads of humans, knowing their thoughts but powerless to change them. Cassina ends up in a variety of minds - her mum's, her dad's, a mad old lady's, a bigot's - but most scarily of all, she ends up in the head of the man who murdered her.
It's an experience that challenges every single one of her beliefs and preconceptions, that terrifies her and frustrates her but, most of all, that changes her. Can it change him too . . .?
This is Cassina's story, in her voice - a voice that will grip you and goad you, make you laugh and make you cry. It is a voice you will never forget.
Nicky Singer has written four novels for adults, two books of non-fiction and six works for young people. Her first children’s novel Feather Boy won the Blue Peter ‘Book of the Year’ Award, was adapted for TV (winning a BAFTA for Best Children’s Drama) and then commissioned by the National Theatre’s Shell Connections series as a musical with lyrics by Don Black and music by Debbie Wiseman. In 2010 Nicky was asked by Glyndebourne to adapt her novel Knight Crew (a re-telling of the King Arthur legend set in contemporary gangland) for an opera with music by Julian Philips. 2012 saw both the publication of The Flask (‘a nourishing and uplifting story, with big themes and a big heart,’ The Guardian) and the premiere of her play Island (about ice-bears and the nature of reality) at the National Theatre. She has just published Island as a novel.
Nicky Singer lives in Brighton with her husband, their two sons and a daughter.
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