AN AWARD-WINNING author stopped off at an East Lothian school recently to entertain youngsters with her latest book.

More than 150 children packed Belhaven Hill School before the lockdown to listen to Maya Leonard and her co-author Sam Sedgman talk about their brand new book, Adventures on Trains: The Highland Falcon Thief.

Youngsters from Law Primary School in North Berwick and Dunbar Primary School joined the hosts and were enthralled by the authors’ stories.

The Highland Falcon Thief is the first book in a major new children’s mystery series entitled Adventures on Trains.

Maya told the children that she had two sons who loved trains, but before she started writing the book with Sam, she had had no interest in them.

Sam, on the other hand, told the gathering that as a child he would run down to the end of the garden just to see a train passing, and that he had actually driven a steam train.

They elaborated on the benefit of writing an adventure story set on a moving train.

They called the setting a ‘closed system’ in literary terms: “No one can get off and no one can escape!” explained Sam.

When the authors first decided to write a series of four books, they agreed that some significant research into steam trains would be important.

Maya began to find the subject matter more and more interesting, she told the children, especially when they visited the National Railway Museum and saw the royal carriages used by Queen Victoria.

Near the end of the talk, a section of the book was read out to the enthralled audience.

Each of the four books in the series is based on a real train or route.