APART from a couple of diversions, one into window dressing in Liverpool and another working in a bakery, David England's life has been all about art. Three years ago he had a memorable exhibition, An Alchemy of Stone, at Hereford Museum and Art Gallery, in which he explored and celebrated the idea of memories held in the stones beneath our feet and all around us.

“I’ve always painted and drawn, since I was about six. If you’re good at something and relatives are telling you you’re good at it, you don’t give it up.

For about 20 years, he also made greetings cards. “I made the cards I would have wanted to buy,” he says. Now he and Colin Jordan have moved into the world of books, publishing Stone in the Blood, a fantasy novel running to almost 400 pages with 20 pages of full-colour illustrations.

With Colin based in the Scilly Isles and David in Herefordshire Skype was extensively used to complete the book, as David explains: "I would sketch my vision of how I thought the locations would look, so that Colin had a visual reference to work from when he wrote the text.

The story centres on 12-year-old Peter Millen, who while staying with his aunt and uncle on the remote Isles of Scilly, slips and cracks his head while exploring the mysterious island of Nornour.

When he awakes in hospital, Peter is amazed to find that he now possesses strange new powers and a unique empathy with Scilly’s stone and rock. He has the ability to weave events and change established history. For each night, from his hospital bed, Peter can travel in time, back thousands of years to an age where Scilly has not yet been inundated by the sea and is still one large island known as An-Nur.

There, with his new friends Leena and Gerth, Peter embarks on a tense, dangerous quest to save the land from destruction and defeat an ancient evil, determined to use the rock energies for its own dark purposes.

As events reach their terrifying conclusion, Peter learns that past and present are more interlinked than he could have possibly imagined...

Find out more about Stone in the Blood and order online at stoneintheblood.com