My new novel, A DIFFERENT WORLD, will be published in January 2025 both by Headline in the UK, and by my German publishers, Piper, under the title DIE ANDERE TOCHTER. The story opens in the summer of 1939, when my heroine, nineteen-year-old Olivia Goodland, meets beautiful, glamorous Grace Ruthwell. Olivia has recently moved to […]
Read moreLooking back over my photos of this year, I notice how many of them include umbrellas and raincoats. It seemed to be a particularly soggy spring and early summer. There’s my sister-in-law sheltering beneath a huge umbrella, and there’s Iain, peering into a muddy moat, water almost up to the level of the bridge he’s […]
Read moreLike many people my age, I can remember how I first heard of the assassination of President Kennedy. The news, sent at speed across oceans and continents by amateur radio enthusiasts, was picked up by my father, a radio ham, on his home-made receiver in a bedroom in our house in the Hampshire countryside. He […]
Read moreI recently read a post on Twitter from a well-known writer in which she bemoaned the fact that after twenty or so novels, she was running out of names for heroines. I sympathise. Although, when it comes to choosing characters’ names, I’ve always felt there to be a larger pool of girls’ names than boys’, […]
Read moreSUMMER AT SEASTONE will be published in hardback and as an ebook in January 2023. The novel is about fresh starts and female creativity. The four central characters, Emma, Bea, Marissa and Tamar, weave in and out of each other’s lives, but the hamlet of Seastone on the Suffolk coast is the place where they […]
Read moreIt’s 1969, and I’m sixteen years old and standing in a small, bare room, attending a routine school medical at my school in Salisbury. I’m cold, and worse, I’m excruciatingly embarrassed because I’m in my bra and pants. The doctor glances at my back and brusquely tells me she’s going to refer me to my […]
Read moreThis question is often put by writers to fellow writers, and my answer is generally ‘yes’. I didn’t have a deadline – or a contract – for my first few novels, and wrote them on spec, but from THE SECRET YEARS on I’ve had both. Which means that I’ve been writing to a deadline for […]
Read moreYou’d think it would get easier. It doesn’t, though. I finished writing my twenty-first novel a month ago and only now feel I’ve recovered sufficiently to recall the process. Starting a novel is like standing on the summit of a mountain and looking down at the fascinating, colourful scenery below, spread out invitingly for you […]
Read moreThe cottage we’re renting for a week in June is on the Kingston Lacy estate in Dorset and is owned by the National Trust. Pink and thatched, it has low ceilings and doorways on which my husband whacks his head at frequent intervals. To one side of it is an overgrown orchard; behind, a patch […]
Read moreThe traffic’s busy, driving through Cambridge to pick up my sister Danielle from the village where she lives. By the time we return to my house, my husband is already welcoming early visitors to his studio. I hastily park the car and Dany rushes indoors to hang her prints, arrange tea-towels and cards. Phew – […]
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