Paver was in the middle of research for another adult novel – Wakenhyrst, about a lonely child growing up in the middle of the marshes in Edwardian Suffolk – so she had to put the germ of an idea for what would become Viper’s Daughter aside. What if one of the trio leaves? And that’s when the ideas started fizzing.” On a trip to the Malangen fjord in northern Norway, she went out into the snow one night and the northern lights appeared: “Not the massively lurid ones you see in documentaries, but it was like a twisted arrow or arch pointing north, and it gave me an idea.

They’d pop into my head at odd moments, and that is very different to other books.” “It was immersive and great fun to be writing an adult gothic, or a ghost story, but even when I was writing them, Torak and Renn and Wolf didn’t go away.

“I missed them acutely when I finished Ghost Hunter,” says Paver now, who has spent the interim years publishing a handful of critically acclaimed novels for adults, from the terrifying ghost story Dark Matter and Thin Air, where five Englishmen set out to climb Kangchenjunga and which was described as a “a heart-freezing masterpiece” by the Observer. It’s wonderful – sheer escapism, for children and adults alike. The canoe was gone,” Paver writes, before sending her stone age boy and his wolf on a quest to the far north, where they’ll be hunted by ice bears, and face their most evil enemy yet. To his alarm, it didn’t lead towards the valley where the clan was camped, but down to the River Blackthorn where he and Renn kept their canoe.

“Tracking was what Torak did best, and even by starlight he found Renn’s three-day-old trail. Now Torak is on the trail of Renn, who has disappeared without a word. Ten years later, Torak, Renn and Wolf are, in fact, back, both in an upcoming TV adaptation of the first six books and in Paver’s latest novel, Viper’s Daughter. “As soon as you write that last line and finish the book they are gone,” she told the Guardian at the time, “and they don’t come back.” W hen Michelle Paver won the Guardian children’s fiction prize in 2010 for the final book in her bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, she was done with the stone age adventures of the boy Torak, his wolf companion, and the girl Renn.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver