I started writing this book while I was working at a solar financing company. It was reasonably fun, and thankfully paid the bills. But it was after I read about how Einstein wrote his theory of relativity while working an office job that I started to wonder: I might not be going back into academic physics, but what am I dying to say to the world?

One thing that drove me from the beginning was finding a way to show just how mysterious and miraculous our universe is… For instance, did you know there are 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on Earth? One of my cousins in Peckham told me how he recently got into a deep YouTube rabbit hole about time travel and that got me thinking – people would dig this kind of stuff if it was presented in an accessible way and in a way that gives them a reason to care in the first place. That’s really where the inspiration for The Upper World came from: the hunch that I could combine the everyday story of a few kids from South London with the otherworldly physics of space and time. And craft a journey gripping enough that the nerds, the mandem — and the rest of us in between — would all want to read it. And would all get it.

With The Upper World, I wanted to combine ideas that aren’t meant to go together. Like time-travel physics and life on an estate. As someone who avoided fiction as a kid, more than anything, I wanted to write the kind of book that younger-me wouldn’t have been able to put down. So for me the more children and even adults that can come away from reading the book with a spark of excitement about physics and the lives of real people like my characters. I’d also love to see teachers putting the book on their summer reading lists. I’d love to see a world where when people talk about the new Enny, Giggs or C.S song, they mention the ideas in THE UPPER WORLD as part of the culture as well