The story of how Fish (Delacorte) came to be published is a bit like the miracle at the center of Laura Matthews's debut novel: Tiger saves the Fish, who leaps from a mud puddle in a war-torn, drought-ridden land. The author never identifies the human narrator Tiger by gender, age or physical attributes. Nor does Matthews identify the country in which Tiger's parents act as relief workers. Even the man who, with his donkey, leads Tiger's family across the border to safety as war encroaches on their small village, is known only as the Guide. Although the author keeps the Guide's nationality and the book's setting anonymous, she steeps the novel in such tangible details—the mountainous terrain, a muddy riverbed—that readers always feel as if they know where they are.

If the book possesses a dreamlike quality, perhaps that is because the seed of the novel was a dream. "I was moving house and watching refugees, I think it was in Afghanistan, on the telly, and a lot combined into a very strong dream," Matthews recalls, speaking from her home in Dorset, England. "I usually don't remember anything in the morning, so it was shocking to have this very real dream and to try to make it make sense."


The author worked to keep the entities of Tiger and the Guide and the setting anonymous. "I wanted readers to feel the way I did in the dream. If I put the Guide's name, some people will have a response—a bristling or a liking," she says. "I wanted the widest possible audience to participate."

Along with Keats and Shakespeare, the Bible had a big influence on the author. "I like Jonah for his spirit, the Moses story, the Jesus story, the Good Samaritan—the moral tales. I love evidence in history that there was a great flood," Matthews says, connecting it back to her tale of a fish that changes size to fit in whatever container it must to survive. "A fish can't change size, but it can, can't it?," she poses rhetorically. "If you've ever been around fishermen, you know the deceptive quality of the size of a fish."

Matthews wrote Fish in two weeks. She admits to an unusual process: "I write in a bizarre way. I write in my head first. I work out the plot while I'm having my coffee in the morning, or waiting outside a shop." The mother of 11-year-old Evie (short for Genevieve) and 15-year-old Jay, the author wrote while they were at school and would stop when they got home. However, she did break her routine one day, when Evie got home from school: "After a bit I told her, 'I'm really sorry, I've got to get back. I've left Tiger under the mud.' "

After she finished the book, Matthews was unsure of her next steps. "I did a Google search on children's books, and there was a link to the Fiddler Award. I hit it accidentally, and [discovered] you could enter as a first-time author, and the prize was to be published," she says. She won the contest and Hodder Children's Books in England published the book; Krista Marino bought it for Delacorte in the U.S.

Her second book, The Outcasts, aimed at teens, will be out in September from Hodder. "I didn't think it would be anything like Fish but I suppose there are some similarities," Matthews says. "The children move into a different dimension, and in my own way I try to make it feel plausible. And it's a moral tale." She is now working on a follow-up to TheOutcasts.

Just as she is winding up the conversation, Matthews says, "I've left one thing out, haven't I?" At the time she was writing Fish, she and her husband had just split up and had sold their house. She wasn't sure where she was going to move with her two children—and three Koi carp. "I'd become attached to them, and felt I knew them personally," Matthews says of the fish. She finally found a 150-year-old rural cottage that she claims "normally only a builder could handle," and she and her kids created a pond in the backyard for the three fish. The next day, two of the Koi disappeared; one fish survives.

Asked what she'd like young people to take away from reading Fish, she says, "Believing miracles can happen—but you have to put something in. You have to try, to not give up."