MURDER, grammar schools, suspicious students and unreliable narrators are what Joanne Harris has in store for readers of her new psychological thriller sequel Different Class.

Speaking about her 16th novel to an audience at Hillingdon’s Compass Theatre on October 28, Harris’ story re-visits the imaginary St Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys where strange happenings and a return from the past make for a chilling narrative.

A teacher for 15 years at Leeds Grammar School before becoming a full-time writer, Harris is not particularly in favour of grammar schools.

The author of the award-winning Chocolat said: “I went to a girls school, which was really the wrong environment for me as a teenager and I didn’t intend to end up teaching in a single sex school, I just happened to get the job.

“I think girls benefit objectively academically from single sex schools and we’ve got some fairly good statistics to back this up, but boys don’t benefit. I don’t think they benefit socially either."

Earlier this year, Harris dropped out of a book festival for the first time due to unfair contract demands which included a six-week exclusivity clause forbidding her to talk anywhere else.

Harris said: “It has to be a reasonable contract and it has to be paid for in a reasonable way.

“I’m not talking here about small festivals that are not making a profit, I’m talking about large festivals that have enormous international presence and who are willing to pay tens of thousands of pounds for flower arrangements, but who still don’t pay their authors.

“If we are to puncture this myth of authors being hobbyists and just working for love, we need to see that some authors do this as a job and it’s something that has to be paid for if somebody else is making money out of it.

“It’s only about fair treatment and an author who signs an exclusivity contract that says that they can’t do another festival for six weeks around the festival they’re doing – you’re effectively saying to that author you can’t tour your book if you do this festival which seems to be unnecessary and unfair."

Recently elected onto the management committee for the Society of Authors, Harris is keen to make a difference and bring about a fairer deal for authors.

The novelist said: “I’m very happy to be part of the committee and very grateful to anybody who voted for me.

“I hope it will give me the opportunity to continue working for a fair deal for authors, to get people to join the Society of Authors and to benefit from the things that the society offers, things like contract evaluation and legal help.

“Also, to try and get more communication between the society and people who are not yet published authors, but who may be up and coming.

“I want to get people involved at an earlier stage so that it’s not an exclusive club.”

With fantasy literature a pleasure for some and a far-fetched story for others, Harris believes that the genre remains a means of articulating a deeper truth.

She said: “It’s not about wanting people to believe in witches, vampires and dragons, it is about exploring what we mean by the monstrous, about what frightens us and how to cope with it.

“Forget Disney and his spangled pink interpretations of what fairy tales were, originally fairytales were not like that.

“At the moment we are living in a time of uncertainty, fear and disillusion and I think if we are looking for the silver lining here, what it means is you’ll probably get a lot of really good dystopian sci-fi and fantasy coming out in the next 5-10 years."

Alongside her writing, Harris has dedicated much of her time to charity work, helping to fight sleeping sickness in the Congo and working with Plan UK to bring about a fairer society for girls across the world.

She said: “We live in a society where very often we feel that we’re very insignificant little bits of a giant hole which is so broken and problematic that nothing can be done to help. It’s not entirely true.

“Plan UK is mostly about trying to help girls and this is partly because girls get a very raw deal in a lot of countries.

“The idea that girls are useless, that girls can’t do anything, girls are a drain on resources and therefore you shouldn’t feed them as much and you shouldn’t send them to school because they’re just girls.

“I’m trying to fight against those attitudes which are often very old traditionally ingrained attitudes."