Blog

Savage Sisters: Heather Atkinson on Girl Gangs ⚡️ Girls in gangs and all-girl gangs. There is a difference and a cross-over. Girls in gangs are usually the girlfriends of the members of male gangs where they are subjected to sexual assault and forced to carry weapons...

When I started to write Welcome to Weaver Street, the first book in the Weaver Street series that brings Kitty and Tom Conlon from Dublin to Liverpool in 1916, I thought about what it must have been like for my great-grandparents to make the same journey from Mayo to...

I lost a dearly loved one to dementia twenty years ago. I still recall the most painful moments, like the first time they didn’t hug me back. Since then I’ve watched other family members suffer from this dreadful condition, and I’ve seen the stress it causes...

In A Taste of Italian Sunshine you can take an armchair wine tasting tour around the Conegliano-Valdobbiadene region with seven different varieties of prosecco selected by our main character Jenn, in her work as a wine buyer. Unfortunately, I made up these wines for...

I have young children, making it difficult for me to jet off to any research destination when I need to, but for the Colline del Prosecco, the setting of A Taste of Italian Sunshine, the May/June half-term (which we call the Pentecost holidays where I live in Bavaria)...

My inspiration for A Mother’s War came from a news article, ‘Children of Shame.’ It was about the children born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers during the occupation of Norway in WW2. I began to wonder what it must have been like for the women who had a...

Set in 1922, The Body at Carnival Bridge begins with Iris attending a speech given by her old friend, Constance Timpson. We first met Constance in Death at Crookham Hall. Since then, she’s inherited her family’s food production business and made radical changes. She’s...

While on holiday in Spain in June 2010, we returned to our villa to find it had been burgled. Standing outside the open window, we didn’t know whether the perpetrators were still inside, and it was terrifying. I read a lot of crime fiction, and that paralysing fear...

Why did I take my characters to the Isle of Sheppey in Eagle of Mercia I hear you cry. Well, the reasoning was sound – there was a monastery on the Isle of Sheppey, just off the coast of Kent, and it’s written that Viking raiders were there ‘Here heathen men raided...