Isabel And Rocco

Isabel and Rocco spend their days listening to the impassioned arguments of their parents, watching and dissecting the murky activity of London life and taking refuge in their shared attic room. As Isabel catalogues the experiences that will gradually pull her away from childhood, Rocco watches his sister grow up.

When their parents inexplicably abandon them, brother and sister find themselves alone -- free from the restrictions of the adult world, blinded by childish dreams and desires. As the house disintegrates around them so too do the lines between adolescence and adulthood, innocence and experience. But when crisis looms, their ever-growing dependency on each other is put to the ultimate test.

Anna Stothard was born in 1983. At the age of 16 she was writing novellas and a regular column called 'Teenage Kicks' for The Observer. That summer she worked on Tina Brown's Talk Magazine in New York for a month; it was at this time that she started to write Isabel and Rocco. At the age of eighteen Anna closed her first publishing deal for Isabel and Rocco.

Anna is the daughter of Peter Stothard, ex-editor of The Times and currently editor of the TLS. Her mother is the critically acclaimed novelist Sally Emerson. She is currently spending her gap year in Italy and China before going up to Oxford in autumn 2003.