About the Author

Joseph Delaney is an English teacher living in Lancashire. He has three children and six grandchildren and is a wonderful public speaker available for conference, library and bookshop events. His home is in the middle of Boggart territory and his village has a boggart called The Hall Knocker, which was laid to rest under the step of a house near the church. Believe it or not, the haunted house in The Spook's Apprentice is based on fact! As a child, Joseph lived in a similar house in Preston where he had a recurrent nightmare. In the dream he'd be sitting on a carpet in the front room whilst his mother was knitting. Then, everything would become cold and a shadow-thing would come up from the coal cellar, pick him up and carry him back towards the dark. What's even more spooky... his brothers had the same nightmare! Joe Delaney is an English teacher living in Lancashire. He has three children and six grandchildren and is a wonderful public speaker available for conference, library and bookshop events. His home is in the middle of

Reviews

" This thrilling and terrifying book should not be read after dark! - Parent: News An absorbing tale with scary scenarios and a great central relationship between Thomas and his master. - Funday Times Zounds! Delaney delights us with the power of his spooken words. Thought-provoking fantasy... A ruse by any other name would smell as sweet. - Bournemouth Daily Echo Teenage readers looking instead for total fantasy should hasten to Joseph Delaney's The Spook's Apprentice (Bodley Head, [pound]8.99). Clad in a sinister brown cover, this terrific novel is as black as David Wyatt's ingenious ink drawings that head each chapter.. Young Thomas can only just cope with these demons; the horrors he faces are made more credible by the cleverly laid-back way in which his story is told. - The Independent"