Encounters

“… an exceptional, unforgettable book…”

“The aliens came just after the children had gone to the playground for their breaktime...”

A team of investigators has travelled to southern Africa to look into what appear to be implausible reports of an extraterrestrial encounter: over fifty kids from a quiet, suburban school claim to have witnessed a spaceship land beyond the edge of the playground.

Sure, it's probably nothing more than a case of mass hysteria, but there's something about these reports that's impossible to ignore: the children all tell the same story, over and over.

And the pictures they draw are identical, right down to the creature with the big eyes emerging through the trees.

How could that many kids lie so convincingly? For so long? They clearly saw something that day, but what?

Inspired by remarkable true events, Encounters covers the time of the investigation as told by six children . . . Six lonely lives, aged between eight and eighteen, who discover they are far more connected to something out there – and each other – than they could have ever thought possible.

What people have been saying about Encounters

  • unique and outstanding

    Shift Zine

  • an exceptional, unforgettable book

    Peters Bookselling Services

  • a stunning new novel from a powerful and original writer

    Tim Bowler

  • ingeniously constructed and as transfixing as the sighting of a UFO

    The Sunday Times

  • “I saw this silver colour flashing orange in the sky, and me and my friends were following it. At first we thought it was an aeroplane, but it had no wings and it was shaped like a disc so we thought maybe it was a UFO, and we started getting scared.”

  • “We saw the silver thing, and there was a man standing at the bottom of it and there was a man standing nearer in the trees. They were just looking at us. They didn’t move their heads like we can.”

  • “If you see something and no one believes it, it’s like that thing can never be true even though it is, and they tease you and call you names, and it makes me really upset.”

Featured in The Sunday Times

Summer Reading List

25 June 2017

  • Elijah 'Baba' Nyamunda, Groundsman, Leda School

    “The aliens came just after the children had gone to the playground for their breaktime. There was much screaming and noise, and at first I did not know why it was so, but later some of the children said they did see something land in the trees. It lands in the trees, and there was this person there, and after it leaves there were some burn marks in the ground.”

  • Patricia Hyde, Member of Staff, Leda School

    “I’m fully aware of how children love to tell a tale, but I’ve seen the pictures those kids drew… And I’ll tell you this for nothing: after over twenty years of living in this school I know kids, and they saw something. They did. I don’t know what it was, but they saw something that day that really got under their skins.”

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