Blog

  Location, location, location – and it doesn’t get much better than the opulent and atmospheric Palace of Versailles. But, as a writer, even when you have the perfect setting you still need the right storyline. I knew that all I had to do was wait and the...

Charming, quirky, loveable, irreverent, sweet, inspirational, adorable and crazy: these are some of the words used by readers to describe my characters. First and foremost, I write novels about ordinary people but, as it turns out, many of my central characters are in...

The question everyone always asks me is – where do your ideas come from? – and I’ve never been able to tell them because they just pop into my head but thinking about it I’ve realised that a good book is like a great film and can be years in the making.  The moment a...

  I have to admit, when I first started talking to friends and family about the ideas for ‘The Weekender’, they were surprised, to say the least. It wasn’t so much the setting, or the storyline: it was more that I’d decided to make the main male character a...

Two books that influenced me. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It contains the ultimate twist. I felt diddled in such an amazing way that I’ll never forget the smile on my face as I put the book down. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. It felt like reading a book that...

I wasn’t an early embracer of the whole social media scene. I joined Twitter to see what it was about but didn’t really use it, barely going on it. Facebook had never had any appeal for me, but writing full time meant having a ‘business’ presence on there was kind of...

Food. Glorious food. Since the 1950s, a multitude of cooking shows have fed our appetites. Today, shows offer more than chefs going through the motions of measuring out ingredients and instead present a hotpot of entertainment, where recipes often come second to...

The best thing about writing novels is that the starting point for a story is invariably many miles away from where it ends up taking you.  In the case of ‘Good Girls’ my initial intention was to write about two sisters who had fallen out over a man. Kat and Eleanor...

I’ve always been fascinated by where authors get their ideas. I love understanding how something small like a snippet of conversation, a song lyric, a view, or a building can grow into a novel.   The Secret to Happiness came from the merging of two ideas around a...