– Thanks for joining us here at YALC. We would love you to introduce yourself
Thank you for having me! I’m Helen, a lover of rom-coms and magical powers. When I’m not writing, I work in theatre and I live in South Wales where I enjoy hiking with my partner and my dog, Cocoa.
– Can you give our readers an overview of your YA novel The Cafe at the End of the World
Yes please! The Café at the End of the World is a supernatural cosy mashup that pairs a sweet café romance with a YA reboot of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Lydie, the teenage daughter of Death (retired), works at her family’s cosy café. She’s a big fan of everything cosy – she knits, she bakes, she loves looking after people who visit the Snug. She is terrified of the door to the afterlife in the café’s basement, but otherwise things are great. Then Kai arrives. He’s mysterious, rude and unhelpfully attractive for someone who seems to want to uncover all of Lydie’s secrets. She’s outraged when he gets a job at the café, but the more she gets to know him, the more she realises that working with Kai might be the only way to save everything.
– And, if you could do it in just 5 words or less, what would they be?
Death’s daughter bakes & (reluctantly) heros.
– What was the original spark that inspired The Cafe at the End of the World?
Café actually started as two separate ideas. There’s something about the current end of days vibes, and the pressure there seems to be on the next generation to fix everything, that made an old idea of a YA reboot of the four horsemen of the apocalypse pop back into my brain. I wanted teens with the power to end the world or save it. But, when I started working on it, all the plots that I came up with were really bleak (or maybe just too bleak for me!).
After The Love Interest (my superhero romcom duology) it felt like a YA cosy romance might be a fun next project. I’m a rom-com girl at heart and I read a lot of adult cosy romance. I came up with Lydie and the Snug, but the plot ideas that came with them all felt too slow for a YA audience (or maybe just for me!).
The moment I laid the two ideas on top of each other, it all started to make sense. A daughter of Death who rebels against her heritage by embracing everything cosy? That was a story that I wanted to write.
– Who was your favourite character to write and why?
It was Pal, Death’s enormous, magical, telepathic horse. Pal is a free spirit and when the Riders retired, Pal decided to stay with Death. He kickstarts the story – Kai gets off a bus in Pont-on-Wye because he sees the huge white horse wandering around the town on his own. Pal is also very easily distracted, so whilst he’s a hugely powerful magical creature, he’s also prone to wandering off to look at some birds or eat some bushes.
– Is there a character that you relate to?
I probably relate to Lydie the most. The story is about what we risk when we stand up for what we believe in and what we gain when we make that leap. And, despite the stakes, Lydie drags her feet, trying to protect her cosy life as everyone else jumps into action, before finally finding her power. With the world the way that it is, the pressure is on all of us to speak up, question our leaders and keep creating art that challenges the staus-quo. I’ve got the creating art thing down, but I’ve only recently started going to protests and always feel like I could and should be doing more.
– Is there a particular scene that felt rewarding to write?
Ah, this is hard to answer without spoilers, but I love a big reveal. Lydie has a lot of secrets and I don’t let her keep them …
– Is there another character’s backstory you would love to explore in another book?
So, there is another book, The Café at the End of the World has a sequel coming out in August 2027. There’s a character called Troy who turns up in Café and I get to dive into his backstory in book 2. Also, there’s more background to the Riders themselves, which was super fun to write.
– Did you have to do much research before you started the writing process for the book?
I’m probably a bit strange as I have to start writing before I really know what I need to research. But once I was drafting, I dived into magic and the magic systems to make sure the world made sense. I decided to root the world of the Naturals (the magical creatures in Pont-on-Wye) in pagan and folkloric nature magic. Our local folklore provided the creatures – the Fae, nature spirits, dragons – and I also researched Samhain (Halloween) and the roots and traditions of that. That research actually shaped the timeline of the book as everything leads towards the dark half of the year, where the flavour of the world’s magic changes.
– Were there any books, films or myths that influenced the story?
So many! Death and his horse, Binky, were always my favourites in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and I’ve always adored the book Good Omens, especially the moments that featured the four horsemen riding towards the apocalypse on their motorbikes. I’ve also always been fascinated by artistic depictions of the afterlife. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials basically shaped my brain as a teenager! The cosy side of the story was mostly shaped by all the adult cosy novels I’ve inhaled over the past few years, including The Pumpkin Spice Café and Act Your Age Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert. I adore the slow-building, sweet romances and the cosy settings, and tried to capture those vibes in Café, alongside the supernatural action.
– How did you approach creating the setting of The Cafe at the End of the World?
The beautiful (fictional) town of Pont-on-Wye is in the Wye Valley on the Welsh – English border, which felt perfect for me as an English author with the chosen home of Wales. It’s a mash up of Tintern and Hay-on-Wye and all the other lovely towns in the area. I really like setting my stories in countryside or seaside towns. I grew up in places like these but when I was younger the stories set there never had diverse families or people who looked liked me in them (mixed heritage, fabulous).
– How did you come up with the title? Was it a hard process?
So … I’m a bit basic when it comes to titles. I wrote a book about a love interest and called it … The Love Interest. My offer of a title for Café was My Cosy Apocalypse which we workshopped with the team at Bloomsbury and came up with The Café at the End of the World – I fell in love with it immediately, it’s the same vibe as my original title but with more nuance and detail. I’m very grateful to the team at Bloomsbury for understanding exactly what the book needed.
– Where do you write?
I love writing in a café, especially if I can have a writing date with Ash Bond (my writing wife and middle grade author genius) or the world-famous Beth Reekles (brilliant romcom author who lives down the road) as we get to combo quiet writing with publishing gossip and sharing ideas. Community is so important, as a writer as it can get quite lonely. I do mostly write at home though at my desk with my ergonomic keyboard (highly recommend), my music and my dog snoring under my desk.
– What is your favourite genre to read?
I’ll read pretty much anything written for adults or a YA audience; horror, sci-fi, lit fic, fantasy, comedy, but my favourite is always a romcom, especially if that romcom has an added element – Beth Reekles has a duology, Do you ship it? and For Real This Time, which combine YA romance, comedy and moments of high fantasy from the TV fantasy series she created for the books – ‘Of Wrath and Rune’.
– Where can our readers find you on social media?
Come and say hi to me on Instagram – @helen_jcomerford
– Finally can you give us your favourite quote from a novel (it can be yours!)?
It’s simple, but it’s the soul of almost everything that I write – ‘You don’t get to tell me who I am.’