A NEW novel by famous children’s writer Ali Sparkes has been released, featuring a reallife Salisbury family.

The Maguire family won the chance to feature as the main characters in the book, which is raising funds for the south’s specialist heart care unit for babies.

The family bid for the chance at an auction for the Friends of Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) in Southampton, where their eight-year-old daughter Victoria was cared for after open heart surgery as a baby.

The family have been written into The Man in the Water after Sparkes, who is a patron of the charity, offered it as a lot.

Victoria’s father Richard said: “After the auction, Ali Sparkes came to interview the children and really picked up on our holidays to Jersey.

“We all loved The Man in the Water story so much that when Ali suggested we get it published and sell it as a paperback to raise funds for PICU, we jumped at the chance.

“It's the obvious thing to do, to give something back to the unit that had cared for Victoria so brilliantly.”

The Man in the Water is a spooky adventure which has connections to the Channel Islands’ occupation by the German Army during the Second World War.

“Like most of my stories, it’s modern and quite fast-paced with a supernatural twist,” said Sparkes.

“But it’s also surprisingly emotional. I know it’s brought a lump to the throats of a few people who have already read it.

“I've got way more caught up in this story than I ever expected to. I had three main characters to work with – Victoria, who was six at the time, and her older sister Eleanor, then nine, and their big brother Cameron, then 12.

“I went to meet the family and find out more about them all and discovered that they holiday on Jersey every year. So that is where I set the story.”

The book is available on the Friends of PICU website shop and plans are in place to put it on Amazon in the near future.