A West Devon first-time writer has published a novel reimagining the worst ever coal-mining disaster in North Wales.

Inspired by actual events, The Wind Road is a haunting time-slip tale about the men who survived the 1934 Gresford Colliery disaster, the hundreds who died and the four-year-old girl who set them free.

Joanna Eden’s debut novel was inspired by her childhood growing up in the Welsh border village of Rosset, near Gresford, and the ‘soot-men’ from the mine she saw in her dreams from her home over the abandoned mine.

The story involves a young girl named Jemima, born over an abandoned mine tunnel, who forms a bond with a ‘soot-man’ she sees each night in her dreams in 1984.

Then, going back in time to 1934, Wey Smith, a miner at Gresford, glimpses a ghost girl following him around in the dark. Fast forward to 2014, an old man sits alone in a colliery cottage, haunted by the legend of Weyland the Smith, a statue of a black swan, and the men entombed in the mine below.

Set during the build-up and aftermath of the disaster, Joanna uncovers their mysterious connection through time.

Joanna says The Wind Road is a tale of magic, coal mining and the meaning of myth in our lives: “As a child in the 80s, I lived over the abandoned tunnels of Gresford mine and saw ‘soot-men’ each night in my dreams. In 2014, I learned about the Gresford disaster and was inspired to tell the miners’ story, a creation that would take me the next ten years.”

Joanna, a finalist in the Exeter Novel Prize competition, self-published her novel by creating Ash Books with her son, Atlas, as a homeschool project to learn about every aspect of publishing.