Blog

The Lake District is a stunning place. Lakes, fells, waterfalls, forests, caves, pretty villages… the National Park has it all. But it wouldn’t look the way it did if wasn’t for one thing: rain! It rains a lot in the Lakes. In fact, the Scottish Highlands, Eryi in...

Pivotal to the plot of The Winter Waif is a sewing machine that almost becomes a character in the story itself. My great-grandmother, Mary Phillips née Harman, was a seamstress of sorts. She owned a Singer treadle sewing machine which I only really got to see after...

Am I alone in believing that our natural skills manifest themselves in their own time? You could drum hundreds of hours of algebra into me as a kid and I’d still be perplexed and left wondering what I was supposed to do with it. Ask me to write an essay on the most...

Even though my new novel, How Not to Murder Your Ex contains a dead body, a car chase and a psychotic killer, it is really – at its heart – a love letter to female friendship. It tells the story of Clio, who has told everyone in her small seaside town that she wants...

Here are the characters of The Vintage Village Bake Off, the Parkin siblings, who are now in their seventies. Hattie Hattie still calls herself Mrs Bowen, despite her marriage to Geoffrey being over for a year. Although he left her for a woman at the bowling club,...

Erin Litteken discusses the inspiration behind her bestselling novel The Memory Keeper of Kyiv on Holodomor Remembrance Day My fascination with Ukraine sparked at my great-grandmother’s knee, listening to the tales she wove of both her life there and the perilous...

Life in the High Alps    A long time ago I did a degree in French and German, but when I finished I couldn't get a job. In consequence I thought it would be a good idea to go to a different country and learn another language so as to make myself more marketable. In...

Many of the characters in this Arsenic at Ascot were inspired by real people. Emilie Augusta Louise Lind af Hageby, known as Lizzy Lind, was a Swedish-born animal activist who founded the Purple Cross for horses and started the first veterinary field hospitals for...

I’m delighted that one of my lovely readers, and most loyal of supporters, is joining me on release day of Welcome to the Cornish Country Hospital, to tell us all about a day in the life of a student nurse, in beautiful Cornwall - Jo Bartlett Over to you Tegan! Hi...