Julie Bertagna

Kerrie feels trapped. She can't spend another day in her chaotic mother's house. Then Kerrie finds an escape. On the rooftop of a nearby tower block live two castaway teenagers, Mauve and Skip. As Kerrie starts to share their sky-high home, she relishes her new-found freedom. And when a freak fire destroys their towerblock, Kerrie decides to leave the city with Mauve and Skip. She thinks that she can leave her problems behind in Glasgow – but what will happen when Kerrie stops running?

Sixteen-year-old Mara and her ship of refugees are tracking the North Star, desperate to find a homeland in the melted ice mountains of Greenland. The vast, floating city of Pomperoy is just one of the shocks that are not in their navigation plans. Unwittingly, the refugees bring catastrophe in their wake for Tuck, a gypsea pirate-boy, and also for Ilira – a land whose inhabitants exist in a state of terror at the top of the world.

In January 2004 a television series for children was created based on Bertagna's book The Ice Cream Machine. The programme is produced in a co-production of Five with SMG and the Gaelic Broadcasting Committee. It is aimed at six- to nine-year-olds and will be broadcast in both English and Gaelic.

Julie Bertagna (born 1962) is a Scottish author who has written real life and science fiction novels for both children and young adults. Her books have been shortlisted for several literature awards, including the Carnegie Medal and her novel Exodus was the winner of the Lancashire County Library Children's Book of the Year Award. Soundtrack, her second novel for young adults, won a Scottish Arts Council Award, the second highest award ever given to a Scottish children's writer.