I am absolutely over the moon (pun intended) to announce that debut author, Lucy Kissick, has signed with the agency. Some of you may have seen my enthusiastic tweet yesterday about holding a piece of genuine meteorite from Mars…yes, I was excited and then even more so when Lucy agreed to be represented by me.

Upon reading her novel, Plutoshine, not only was I fascinated by the science and the small details which made the setting so realistic and plausible - but the characters were just wonderful and I totally fell in love with Nou.

A brief encounter with alien life has left one girl mute, her father comatose, and her brother changed beyond all recognition...

Terraforming — the megascale-engineering of a planet’s surface to one more Earth-like — is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto’s is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. Four billion miles from the Sun and two hundred degrees below zero, what this worldlet needs is light and heat. Through captured asteroids and solar mirrors, humanity’s finest scientists and engineers are set to deliver them.

What nobody factored in was a saboteur — but who, and why?

From the start, terraformer Lucian is intrigued by nine-year-old Nou, traumatised to muteness after a mysterious incident that shook the base and upended her family into chaos. If he could reach her, perhaps he could understand what happened that day – and what rumours she knows about life on Pluto.

For Nou has a secret — one that could put a stop to the terraforming. But crippled by her fears, and unable to trust her family, there is no one she can talk to. Only through Lucian’s gentle friendship does she start to rediscover her voice — and what she has to say will transform our sense of place in the Universe.

Plutoshine does for Pluto what The Martian did for Mars. This wonderfully heart-warming and emotive novel is as much about friendship, and the ties that cross divides of space and species, as it is about the science behind terraforming and the next logical step for humankind.

Lucy explained a little more about what inspired her to write the novel:

‘Plutoshine grew from a short story I wrote, one where I wanted my readers to stop and appreciate something we all take for granted: the Sun, and all its life-giving warmth. But what started out as concept-driven quickly grew a heart powered by its characters, and months after finishing I was still worrying and wondering about the humans of Pluto. Who were they, and what were their deepest desires? I knew then I’d found the story for my first novel. Besides, as a planetary scientist I had already fallen in love with Pluto's unearthly geology: the heart-shaped ice sheet, the nitrogen snow! Plutoshine was how I got to explore that world.’

About the Author: Lucy Kissick is a planetary science researcher, currently simulating ancient Martian lakes in the lab at the University of Oxford for her PhD. She is also part of a team designing a mission concept to the Asteroid Belt in collaboration with the European Space Agency.

Born in Southport, Plutoshine is her debut novel and has been shortlisted for the inaugural W&A Working-Class Writers’ Prize.