Grimmer Girl here. I'm Minion Fuggedy and today I have Paula Braxton, author of The

New York Times Best, seller The Witch's Daughter, and now the author of the new book The Little

Shop of Found Things. The audio on this interview is a little spotty in places, but it was

so interesting to hear Paula talk about how she picks her character's names, how she

uses language to set a tone, and how she got her first novel published and now juggles

working on multiple books at once that I decided to go with it. But do know that I've already

made changes so my future interviews will sound better. And now here's the interview.

Hi Paula, thanks for being with me today. Hi, thank you for inviting me. Oh, we're delighted

to have you. So can you start by telling our listeners about the new book? Well, the

new book is called The Little Shop of Found Things. It's set in Wiltshire, which is a county

in England for those of you that don't know. And it's a very rural, ancient county full

of standing stones and chalk, hill figures and lay lines and ancient buildings and a lot

of history, which is one of the things that appealed to me. And in this county there's

a town called Moulbra, which is a little market town. And the main character, Zanthie and

her mother, Laura, go to Moulbra to take on an antique shop, which they bought. They've

got quite a difficult past. And they're starting again and they buy this antique shop and

it's a bit rundown and full of old things that may or may not be worth anything. This is

going to be their new start and their new business. They've been in the antique street

a long time, but they've left their London life behind. So Zanthie has a special gift in

that if she holds certain objects, she can detect things about them. It's called Psychometry.

She can sense a little bit of their history and her mother is also called this thing sing

to her. So even when she was a child, she would pick up certain antiques and get things

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