Every story needs a beginning.
Mine began in Manchester… and so did the book.

Not because it was convenient.
Not because it was familiar.
But because there is something about this city that has always pushed the world forward, always asked more of the people who live in it, always dared to imagine that things could be different.

Manchester isn’t a backdrop in The Song of the Blackbird.
It is the ground the story stands on.
The stone underfoot.
The breath before the first note.

It is the place where things change.

Where it all began

When I think about the book’s opening, I think of Manchester Central Library – the quiet, circular cathedral of knowledge where the first pages root themselves. A building that has heard everything: whispered ambitions, exam anxieties, political meetings, private revelations. It has the stillness of a place that carries the weight of generations who came there to understand the world a little better.

It felt inevitable that the story would begin there.
In those rooms.
Under that dome.
At the centre of the city that has always been the centre of so much more.

A city that never accepts the world as it is

Manchester has a long history of refusing to stay silent.

Peterloo began here – a moment of unimaginable loss that sparked a national reckoning.
Emmeline Pankhurst began here – a woman who forced the world to confront its injustice.
Movements began here. Ideas began here. New ways of thinking began here – Turing’s codebreaking mind, the creation of the modern computer, the birth of graphene, the fight for votes, rights, and representation. All carried by the spirit of the Manchester Bee.

Even today, the city carries that same defiant light. The refusal to settle. The belief that ordinary people, standing together, can change the course of history… not with grand speeches, but with persistence, unity, and the courage to question.

That spirit runs through the book.
It’s impossible to write about Manchester without writing about awakening, about awareness, about the moment a person looks at the world and realises they are no longer prepared to accept the story they’ve been given.

A city that taught the world to feel differently

From the mills to the suffragettes, from groundbreaking science to football clubs that command global devotion, from music that shaped entire generations to communities that rise stronger every time they are tested – Manchester’s influence is woven through modern life.

Maybe it didn’t “birth” the entire modern music scene, but it undeniably transformed it. Manchester gave the world voices that refused to be ignored, sounds that reshaped identity, and songs that told people everywhere they weren’t alone in what they felt.

This city has always known how to speak to the soul.

Why the story needed to start here

Because The Song of the Blackbird isn’t just about chase and danger and mystery.
It’s about questioning.
It’s about remembering.
It’s about seeing the familiar world with new eyes… the way Manchester has always taught its people to do.

It’s about the moment a person realises that the life they live is not the whole story.
That there is something more.
That change begins the second we decide it must.

Manchester understands that moment better than any place I know.

This city shaped me long before I began writing. It shaped my sense of truth, injustice, possibility, and empathy. It shaped the way I see people and the systems they live inside. And it shaped the belief, which is central to the book, that humanity can choose differently, that we can remember who we are, that we are all connected and we can make a stand against what is seeking to control us and our collective destiny.

And so the Song begins where every real change begins

In a city that has already changed the world many times over.
A city that has rebuilt itself, reimagined itself, and risen from quiet resolve and collective strength.

Manchester is not the setting of The Song of the Blackbird.
It is the ignition point.
The turning of the key.
The beginning of the new questioning – the kind that asks:
What if the world isn’t quite what we think it is?
And what could it become if we dared to truly look?

The B of the Bang

A monument that didn’t just stand in Manchester, it expressed Manchester.

Inspired by the explosion of a sprinter leaving the blocks, it represented that exact instant where movement becomes unstoppable. The split-second where potential becomes action.

It didn’t matter that the sculpture no longer stands.
What mattered was what it symbolised:
courage, acceleration, defiance, and the sheer force of taking the first step.

In many ways, The Song of the Blackbird carries that same moment of ignition, not in plot, but in meaning. A sense of turning, awakening, beginning again.

The Song begins in Manchester because real change has always begun here.

In this city, everything has always begun with a single, defiant choice.

And in the Blackbird’s story, it begins again.