Philip Murdstone is the author of sensitive, award-winning young-adult novels that don’t sell. Living on Dartmoor, in love with his agent, Minerva, and in despair, he is told that he must write a fantasy novel or die in poverty.

If this all sounds rather close to the bone (given that Mal Peet himself is an admired, award-winning author of modestly selling YA novels who also lives in Devon), what follows is unusual. Our hero gets horribly drunk, wanders out into a stone circle on Dartmoor and somehow becomes the