Bolton-born Michael Scholes is a storyteller pure and simple. His debut children’s book, ‘Hector’s Astonishing Secret’, is just one of the many stories he has already written. Bridging the gap between picture books and full novels, his stories are in prose or rhyme but always of a manageable length for a new ‘free reader’. Funny, exciting or just crazy, the young reader is hooked, eager to find out what happens next and unable to stop reading. As he puts it, “Surely that’s the whole point, isn’t it!”