Blog

Ideas for novels come from all kinds of strange little crevices in the brain. But this one was a little bit different. I was chatting to a friend, Hazel, who’d just moved into our area on Glasgow’s Southside. ‘Did you know there’s a houseplant hospital near here?’ she...

The general strike in 1926 was mainly out of sympathy for the miners. Because of certain changes internationally, it became difficult to export coal at a price that remained profitable for the mine owners. Therefore they cut the wages of the men from £6.00 a week to...

In 1928, Agatha Christie took her first solo trip abroad, a year after her divorce from Archie Christie. Originally, she planned a trip to the West Indies. But at a supper party two days before her scheduled departure, her friends Katherine and Leonard Woolley...

There are many examples of stories about twins (or triplets, in one case), both in fiction and real life. As a writer, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of twins, and I’m clearly not the only one. These are some of the stories I had in mind while I was writing...

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware" - Martin Buber For me, Japan is a land of secrets. Tiny bars hidden down lantern-lit alleys. A Michelin star ramen shop in a seemingly abandoned shopping mall. Ancient temples sandwiched between...

Women at Cambridge University  The 1914 parts of The House at River’s Edge revolve around two women, Grace and Winn, who have attended Girton College in Cambridge.   In 1914 women could attend one of two colleges, Girton or Newnham, and were able to sit the Tripos...

Oscar the Dog In my Armstrong and Oscar murder mysteries, there are two main protagonists - a man and a dog, dan and Oscar. Oscar is my homage to Merlin, our old black Labrador. He was without doubt (and I totally refuse to accept any argument on this) the bestest dog...

Holly Manktelow Q&A extract, April 2023. Holly, a teacher from Eastbourne, swam the Channel in August 2022 (in 17 hours 22 minutes) while raising money for The Youth Counselling Project in Seaford, East Sussex. I interviewed her before I started writing The Swim....

I’m thrilled to tell you a little about This Thing Called Love and introduce some of the themes. As in my other books, nature is a part of the story – in this case, a beautiful arboretum set in the English South Downs that’s home to rare species of trees and with...