Liv Evans asked Frances Evelyn:

The world of The Changeling Tree is so richly formulated, what would you say your biggest influences were when you created it?

Frances Evelyn Hi Liv. Thanks for your question and sorry that it's taken me so long to reply.

I've been working on The Changeling Tree in the gaps between other things, so it's probably a composite of influences from everything I've read and watched and experienced across fifteen plus years, as well as the books that made me want to be a writer before that. The characters sometimes talk about some of these sources: look out for Doctor Who and Buffy.

My Faerie world is a modernised version of the medieval otherworld, but I was sure they'd have updated their balls and gowns in the meantime. My Faerie folk are bored, childish and quarrelsome. I'm sure they're influenced by the beautifully world-weary vampires in Stuart Hill's Icemark Chronicles, which I read to my younger son along the way.

I haven't read many modern books about fairies -- I wanted to make up my own rules for them -- but I loved Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce, which is set in Charnwood, not far from where my characters lived. His characters explore the implications for mental health of fairy abduction, which you'll see more of in later books in the series. I also really enjoyed Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife, which looked at the challenges of carrying on with normal life as a time-traveller.

Finally, the cupboard is a nod to C.S. Lewis's wardrobe, which is the book Tracy's reading just before Rose bursts into her bedroom.

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