Blog

Dear Reader,  It gives me tremendous pleasure to welcome you to Foxglove Hall, a place that has lived in my imagination and my heart for many years. It’s a place that feels real to me. I hope the characters and their stories will spring off the pages for...

The cider girls were keen to do their bit to support the war effort, so they were excited when they got the chance to go to Yeovil during Wings for Victory Week.  This was a nationwide fundraising event to help finance the construction of new aircraft for the war...

Researching Vienna in 1931 The first two novels in my Foreign Correspondent series are set in Berlin in 1930 and Vienna in 1931. Superficially, there are similarities between the two cities.  Most obviously, their inhabitants both speak German.  In the 1930s, they...

One of the many challenges of writing The First Kingdom Series, set in fifth-century Britain, is understanding what people believed before Christianity became the dominant religion. The main reason is that there is little, or at times no, written evidence of the gods...

Alas, it was all a dream... It’s a tired cliché when it appears in a story, and not very reliable as a source of inspiration. Many’s the time I’ve woken in the night and tried to cram the details of a vivid dream into my memory, only to discover the next morning that...

The Ice and Fire series is set in my re-imaginings of an alternative Viking-age Iceland, with dragons (and a few other things going on too). So yes, this is potentially not a ‘normal’ inspiration for fantasy writers, but I’ve always been drawn to fantasy books that...

Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery is one of her most intriguing hybrids. Part country-house mystery, part Bright Young Things adventure, part espionage thriller. The new Netflix Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials three-part series both streamlines and radically...

Bianca Constantine, the heroine of TO ALL THE EARLS I’VE LOVED BEFORE, is an aspiring artist. And I wondered how realistic this was, for a young woman in the early nineteenth century. I’d heard of Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun and Angelica Kaufmann, but both of these female...

Sometimes the inspiration for a book arrives when you’re least looking for it... Last year I booked to go to Crete, to celebrate my brother’s 50th birthday. We were staying in a resort called Kato Gouves, on the north east coast, and although I have been to Crete many...