A mysterious, isolated, rambling house looms up in front of our hero, or heroine. It's a classic start to a traditional story - and one of author Linda Newbery's favourite settings. Her award-winning young adult novel Set in Stone started in a spooky house inspired by the old manor at Wheatley Park School, where the author was an English teacher for many years, and her latest book, Nevermore, begins in a similar way.

The house in Nevermore was modelled on Snowshill Manor in the Cotswolds, owned by the National Trust since the death of owner Charles Wade, who collected weird and wonderful things from around the globe - paintings, toys, musical instruments and Japanese Samurai warrior masks.

Linda said: "I had visited Snowshill before - I didn't go there with any intention of using it, but while I was wandering around, I had an idea about a manor house where nobody lived, all furnished and kept ready for the owner to return."

Fiction then took over, and a central character emerged - Finnegan, a reclusive puppet-maker and collector of oddities who manages the mansion, keeping it prepared for the owners' return. The narrator, 12-year-old Tizzie, is very different from the protagonist of Set in Stone, Samual Godwin, and the book is aimed at slightly younger readers.

Tizzie's bad-tempered mother has been engaged as cook, having lived a nomadic life, moving from one place to another as soon as she has settled. Tizzie is curious to meet the owner, Lord Rupert, and his daughter Greta, who Tizzie hopes will be the friend she longs for. They are always expected next week, but no one ever comes. Meanwhile, Tizzie - a city child who has grown up in inner London - explores the house and grounds, listens to Finnegan's stories and helps him to make puppets.

Linda said: "I used the museum rooms in Snowshill, and the garden, influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, with different 'rooms', each with its own view. It's a garden where you keep finding little areas that you haven't come across before, or seeing things from a different point of view."

She added: "I wandered around with my camera and made a collection of shots of the garden through alleyways, with paths, entrances and perspectives. But in my imagination, the house is different. I couldn't resist calling the village Sleet, just as a nod to Snowshill."

While she has used the 'big house' before to create an atmospheric setting for her books, Nevermore is a new departure. "I didn't really plan to do another 'house' book, but this was an idea that just grabbed me very quickly. It's a bit different in tone from my other younger novels - very traditional, really, and a little larger-than-life. It's like the Secret Garden story, or perhaps Rebecca.

"I like the idea of the house, because it can be the focus of everything that happens, and different people come and go - people of different classes and backgrounds. But this book has an element of eccentricity, which I like."

She has written more than 30 stories for all age groups. Set in Stone, which won the children's category of the Costa book awards, is being marketed as an adult book in France and Romania. One of her books for readers aged nine-plus, Catcall, inspired by a visit to the Cotswold Wildlife Park, won a Nestle award; while The Shell House - based on Copped Hall, a burnt-out stately home which the author visited with her mother during her Essex childhood - was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

She seems mildly puzzled by her recent success, attributing it to better marketing, children's fiction becoming more fashionable - and partly to her Oxford-based publisher, David Fickling.

She wanted to write from the age of eight, having started novel-writing 20 years ago, while at Wheatley Park. In 1988, her first book, Run With the Hare, was picked from the slush pile by an editor at HarperCollins - after it had been rejected by dozens of other publishers, including Mr Fickling, who was then an editor at Oxford University Press.

"He rejected the book, but was good enough to invite me to meet him. It was very kind - how many editors would find the time to do that?" As her writing became more successful, she went part-time, and after a year at Matthew Arnold School, Cumnor, gave up her job in 2000 to write full-time. "I used to write the first draft in the summer holidays, but it was very difficult to write during term-time, " she said.

She added: "I had been writing for a good many years before winning any awards. I think children's books are marketed more now. When my first books came out you hoped that it would get reviewed and get into bookshops and that was it."

For the past five years she has lived in Croughton, on the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border, where - like fellow children's author Philip Pullman - she writes in a wooden hut in the garden.

In April, an earlier novel Flightsend is being reissued after a re-write, along with Linda's first picture book, called Posy, based on one of her cats, which sadly went missing shortly after she wrote the story. Would she consider an adult novel?

"Yes, it has been something I have wanted to do for several years but I have been too busy. I think I am going to make this the year that I do it."

Nevermore is published by Orion at £9.99.