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  • Published: 24 October 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473532021
  • Imprint: BBC Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432

Doctor Who: The Target Storybook




A brilliant new collection of spin-off stories from famous episodes throughout the history of Doctor Who - and a new format for the successful Target publishing range.

We’re all stories in the end…

In this exciting collection you’ll find all-new stories spinning off from some of your favourite Doctor Who moments across the history of the series. Learn what happened next, what went on before, and what occurred off-screen in an inventive selection of sequels, side-trips, foreshadowings and first-hand accounts – and look forward too, with a brand new adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor.

Each story expands in thrilling ways upon aspects of Doctor Who’s enduring legend. With contributions from show luminaries past and present – including Colin Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Vinay Patel, Joy Wilkinson and Terrance Dicks – The Target Storybook is a once-in-a-lifetime tour around the wonders of the Whoniverse.

  • Published: 24 October 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473532021
  • Imprint: BBC Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432

About the authors

Terrance Dicks

Terrance Dicks became Script Editor of Doctor Who in 1968, co-writing Patrick Troughton’s classic final serial, The War Games, and editing the show throughout the entire Jon Pertwee era to 1974. He wrote many iconic episodes and serials for the show after, including Tom Baker's first episode as the Fourth Doctor, Robot; Horror at Fang Rock in 1977; State of Decay in 1980; and the 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors in 1983. Terrance novelised over sixty of the original Doctor Who stories for Target books, including classics like Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen and Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, inspiring a generation of children to become readers and writers. He died in August 2019, only weeks before the publication of his final Doctor Who short story, ‘Save Yourself’, in The Target Storybook.

Matthew Sweet

Matthew Sweet presents the BBC radio programmes Free Thinking, Sound of Cinema and The Philosopher’s Arms. He has judged the Costa Book Award, edited The Woman in White for Penguin Classics and was Series Consultant on the Showtime/Sky Atlantic series Penny Dreadful. His books include The West End Front and Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers and Themselves.

Simon Guerrier

Simon Guerrier is co-author of Doctor Who: The Women Who Lived and Whographica for BBC Books, and has written countless Doctor Who books, comics, audio plays and documentaries. He has been a guest on Front Row and The Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4 and, with his brother Thomas, makes films and documentaries – most recently Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt for Radio 3.

Colin Baker

Colin Baker is an English actor who became known for playing Paul Merroney in the BBC drama series The Brothers from 1974 to 1976. He went on to play the sixth incarnation of the Doctor in the TV series Doctor Who. He reprised the role for the 1993 Children in Need special, Dimensions in Time, and the 1989 stage show Doctor Who – The Ultimate Adventure. He has also voiced the Doctor for over 140 Doctor Who audio stories for Big Finish Productions.

Matthew Waterhouse

Matthew Waterhouse played Adric, companion to Tom Baker and Peter Davison's Doctors from 1980 to 1982. Since then, he has worked extensively as an actor in theatre. His published writing includes a memoir, Blue Box Boy, three novels and a book of stories. Recently he's appeared in episodes of the audio version of Dark Shadows and numerous Doctor Who audio projects, including an award-winning one-man play, Doctor Who: A Full Life, and a forthcoming quartet of new adventures starring alongside Tom Baker.

Jenny T Colgan

Jenny T. Colgan has written numerous bestselling novels as Jenny Colgan, which have sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide, been translated into 25 languages, and won both the Melissa Nathan Award and Romantic Novel of the Year 2013. Aged 11, she won a national fan competition to meet the Doctor and was mistaken for a boy by Peter Davison.

Jacqueline Rayner

Jacqueline Rayner is the author of over 40 books and audio plays, including number one bestseller The Stone Rose, the highest-selling Doctor Who novel of all time, and two Doctor Who ‘Quick Reads’ for World Book Day. She lives in Essex with her husband and twin sons, and writes regularly for Doctor Who Magazine.

Una McCormack

Una McCormack is a New York Times bestselling author. She has written four Doctor Who novels: The King's Dragon and The Way through the Woods (featuring the Eleventh Doctor, Amy, and Rory); Royal Blood (featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara), and Molten Heart (featuring the Thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Ryan and Graham). She is also the author of numerous audio dramas for Big Finish Productions.

Steve Cole

Steve Cole is an editor and children’s author whose sales exceed three million copies. His hugely successful Astrosaurs young fiction series has been a UK top-ten children’s bestseller. His several original Doctor Who novels have also been bestsellers.

Vinay Patel

Vinay Patel is a playwright and screenwriter. His television debut was the BAFTA-winning Murdered By My Father and for Doctor Who he has written Demons of the Punjab. His latest play, An Adventure, ran at the Bush Theatre in 2018. Elsewhere, he contributed to the bestselling collection of essays, The Good Immigrant.

Susie Day

Susie Day grew up in Penarth, Wales, with a lisp and a really unfortunate choice of first name.

She has had lots of jobs, including guiding tourists and professional nappy-changing - but she always wanted to be a writer. Her first book, Whump! in which Bill falls 632 miles down a manhole, won the BBC Talent Children's fiction prize, and was published in 2004.

Susie now lives in Oxford, England, and eats a lot of cake and drinks a lot of tea.

Mike Tucker

Mike Tucker is an author specialising in books for children and young adults, and has written several original ‘Doctor Who’ novels, a number of ‘Merlin’ novelisations, and original fiction for other shared universes. He has also co-written numerous factual books relating to film and television, including a history of the BBC’s Visual Effects Department, ‘Impossible Worlds’ (a look at the concept art of ‘Doctor Who’) and the TARDIS Instruction Manual.

Alongside his writing, Mike is a BAFTA winning Visual Effects Designer, and his company - The Model Unit - has been responsible for miniature effects sequences for programmes such as ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Red Dwarf’ and ‘Good Omens.’

Bibliography

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Joy Wilkinson

Joy Wilkinson is an award-winning writer working across film, television, theatre and radio. As well as Doctor Who her TV credits include Nick Nickleby and The Watch. Her directing debut – the film Ma’am – is released in 2020.

Beverly Sanford

Beverly Sanford's first Young Adult novel, The Wishing Doll, was published by Badger Learning in 2014, followed by Remember Rosie, Silent Nation and two non-fiction books. A BBC Writer’s Room semi-finalist (2011) and an Editor’s Choice in the Jim Henson Co/Penguin Dark Crystal Author Quest (2014), Bev is currently working on a screenplay for Sun Rocket Films and a children’s fiction series.

Praise for Doctor Who: The Target Storybook

With poise, restraint and deep intelligence, Sahota feeds us big, difficult themes - segregation and freedom, revolution and empire - in a form that is unsweetened, fresh and nourishing. Surely this, his third novel, will propel him up the shortlists to the prizewinning status he deserves.

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times, 'This Book Will Win Prizes'

There is a scrupulous subtlety about that way that Sahota refuses to let his historical characters act as though they are in a historical novel.

Alex Clark, Guardian, Book of the Day

Sahota combines great writing with amazing storytelling... his books are intelligent and beautifully written and very poised but also incredibly immersive, gripping and very moving. An epic in miniature, China Room is the kind of novel that reminds you why you fell in love with reading in the first place.

Open Book, BBC Radio 4

Sahota gives his period narrative the same effortless immediacy as his present-day one, yet his novel works by stealth, quietly beguiling the reader into an almost painful intimacy... I loved it.

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

Sahota is a truly original novelist, his prose sparingly precise in its beauty, steeped in kindness and deep humanity.

Ruth Scurr, TLS

Engrossing, intricate, excellent.

Literary Review

Sahota's beautifully crafted novel dovetails two stories from different eras... Both characters are prisoners of circumstances but, in their hunger for redemption, become emblematic of the human condition.

Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday

China Room is a rare novel that makes you pause in its beauty.

Francesca Carington, Sunday Telegraph, *Novel of the Week*

A gripping read... a memorable and poignant depiction of how family histories can echo through the generations.

Huston Gilmore, Daily Mirror

China Room is very good at examining the trauma held in one family, whether it be personal or housed in a home, village, or country. Sahota seems to acknowledge that although we are not doomed to repeat the past, each subsequent generation feels a measure of the hardship that the last generation faced... a well-developed story of two lives that touch one another in ways that that can never be clearly seen.

India Lewis, Arts Desk

Outstanding... dense with intricate layers. As author, Sahota brilliantly plays with access to knowledge, to history. China Room promises to haunt and to illuminate.

Shelf Awareness

Novels this good are rare.

Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail, *Summer Reads of 2021*

Sahota's prose is a finely modulated instrument that moves from subtle minutiae to cosmic magnitude... Exhibiting the narrative control and psychological acuity of Rohinton Mistry and Jhumpa Lahiri, Sahota's tale of trans-generational trauma is quietly devastating.

Madeleine Feeny, Spectator

Sunjeev Sahota's writing is the stuff of miracles. Emotional and heartrending, China Room juggles questions of love, debt, and what it means to build a home alongside the history that carries us. China Room is a propulsive dream, intricately wrought, and Sahota is a maestro.

Bryan Washington, author of LOT and MEMORIAL

Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways propelled him on to the 2015 Booker shortlist. His latest, China Room, a multi-generational masterpiece ... could well see him nominated again.

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Such a thrilling combination of beauty and heartbreak. It's breathtaking.

Charlotte Mendelson, author of ALMOST ENGLISH

An intense drama of classic themes - love, family, survival, and betrayal - told with passion and precision in Sahota's economical, lyrical prose.

Adam Foulds, author of THE QUICKENING MAZE

An extraordinarily gifted writer... Sahota's ability to shine a phrase is not bought for the usual steep formalist price, at the expense of simplicity, intimate feeling, and solid representation. He's both camera and painter, in a literary world that often separates those novelistic tasks.

James Wood, New Yorker

Political currents seep subtly in and the cumulative effect is potent

Max Liu

Exquisitely written

Sameer Rahim, Daily Telegraph, *Books of the Year*

Sunjeev Sahota balances weighty ideas about cultural prisons and self-determination with hushed, featherweight prose

Claire Allfree, The Times, *Books of the Year*

[A] hauntingly beautiful novel

Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

Sahota's third novel has prose so beautiful it stops you dead

Daily Telegraph
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