Author of CBC Book of the Year 2009 - THE SHACK Wm Paul Young was born a Canadian and raised among a technologically stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was then New Guinea. He suffered great loss as a child and young adult, and now enjoys the 'wastefulness of grace' with his family in the Pacific Northwest. Paul wrote the first version of THE SHACK many years ago when his children were small. He wanted them to understand God's grace, and that his concern and love for our wellbeing is constant. Over the years THE SHACK has grown, developed and through many different versions turned into the great success it is today. A large part of the success around THE SHACK is the phenomenon behind how it got published. Paul, along with two friends, Brad and Wayne, submitted it to many major publishers in the US. The Christian publishers thought it was a little too dangerous for their market and the commercial publishers thought it was a little too Christian.

Undeterred, because they believed so strongly in the book and in the message behind it, Paul's two friends set up their own publishing house and published it. To date, they spent £100 on the marketing of this book. It went on to amazon.com and by word of mouth sold over 100 million copies in the first year alone. They were actually fulfilling the orders out of Brad's garage. Wendy Grisham, our Publishing Director had this to say about Paul:'I had the great pleasure of meeting Paul last summer during the whirlwind that was growing around the phenomenon of THE SHACK. He is an incredibly humble man and his openness, his rawness, draws people to him. He stops to talk to everyone, to shake hands, to look people in the eye and to genuinely invest in them, and I realised how incredibly rare that is in this day in age.

' In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant THE SHACK wrestles with the timeless question,'Where.