check out website: www.cosmos-books.com and www.wildsidepress.com and www.astroart.org

Aurora is a baby girl brought in during the London Blitz of WW2 and replaces the dead baby of a mother caught in a bomb blast. She grows up and briefly becomes a stage synthesiser player before fleeing into the background again.

Finding herself ageing very slowly, she regularly moves and changes her identity, getting qualified enough along the way to become part of the first manned flight to Mars.

Despite or due to some mishaps, Aurora discovers the beacon that leads the Martian Expedition to a downed spacecraft and discovering its secrets...which are far more human than alien.

With any first novel, someone like me is bound to be open to problem areas as much as whether the book is readable or not. Hardy definitely has his eye on the mood of the places like London or even 70s rock concerts.

As he's painted Mars enough times over the years, his knowledge here has also served some benefit and serves as a guide to the red planet. [Incidentally, he's doing the artwork for a new non-fiction book 'Futures: 50 Years In Space' by Patrick Moore to be released next year.]

If there are any weaknesses, then it has to be with the way Aurora conveniently walks through life without anyone else getting the wiser over the decades to her age. Even being selected by NASA for the Mars Expedition, you'd have thought more than a cursory look at her past, let alone her medical history, would have revealed the things that were crucial to the finale of the book.

Hardy's use of characters are all right as far as they go but would have been helped by having a little more friction between the various personalities during the various crisises. Then again, I might just be too picky. After all, if you were going to Mars you wouldn't want a bickering team or you'd be driven nuts after a week.

Still, it's an encouraging read and no doubt David Hardy will learn from this novel and bring this knowledge to his second book.

GF Willmetts