Plus the online support group where she meets a new member, Celeste. There is her new friend Tom McDermott from Holding Hands who has started visiting her once a week, just to listen, do jigsaw puzzles, and talk. There is also the guy who delivers her groceries. She has her cat Fred and her best friend, Sadie. Just wait until you meet her mom, actually you don't want to meet her mom.īut Meredith isn't totally alone.

Her childhood experiences had already taken so much from her. Still, things weren't really okay for Meredith before that terrible thing happened. She'd dated, had a boyfriend, went to the pub with friends, but all that changed after a terrible thing happened to her. She'd worked outside of her home once and actually saved enough to buy her own place. Meredith isn't living a 'normal' life now. I enjoyed the way the story was told, allowing my mind to prepare itself for the things that happened to Meredith to have her not leaving her home for over three years. The past is presented in a nonlinear manner, often triggered by something in the present day. Meredith, Alone takes place in the present day but goes back into the past often. 'Lucy and the Bully' won the 2009 Paterson Prize for Young People and 'Small Florence' was short listed for the 2010 Mad About Books Stockport Schools' Book Award. The award honors an author or illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.

'Back to Front and Upside Down' won the 2013 Schneider Family Book Award from the American Libraries Associataion. 'Monkey and the Little One' was shortlisted for the 2015 Junior Design Awards and listed as one of the top ten best new picture books during Independent Book Sellers Week 2015.

She regularly visits schools and enjoys drawing for children.Ĭlaire's new title 'The Best Bit of Daddy's Day' will be published in June 2016. In 2007 Claire wrote her own course on writing and illustrating picture books which she has been teaching ever since, and now at the House of Illustration. Here Claire produced her first dummy book for Small Florence, which was then published and started her dream career as an author illustrator. She moved to London in 1995 and stumbled through many different jobs until she studied children's illustration at Putney School of Art. she has always loved drawing from an early age and remembers being asked by her school mates to draw rabbits for them! After school she studied Fine Art at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Canterbury where she achieved a BA degree in Painting. Claire was born in Bath, Wiltshire and moved to Kent when she was six.

Meredith alone