Kate Williams’s biography of Emma Hamilton, England’s Mistress, felt very personal to me. Brought up in Merton, our childhood war-wounds were tended at the Nelson hospital’s A & E department (no longer there) and my local pub was called the Emma Hamilton (now boarded up). My partner was born near Emma Hamilton’s birthplace on the Wirral…
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Luck plays a very large part in most writers journeys to publication. Luck, and timing.  If I hadn’t chosen to attend a lecture by Jack Shepherd (of Teacher, Teacher fame) when attending the Winchester Writers’ Conference I would never of heard about the Daily Mail First Novel Award. Talk about getting in by the skin of…
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Whether you are hibernating, detoxing, poorly or plain broke, you will need something fabulous to read to get through the mid-January slump. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone but, for five days only, from Monday 14th to Friday 18th, I Stopped Time and These Fragile Things will be available to download from Amazon free of charge. What do you…
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As voted for by the lovely people at Bookmovement.com: 1. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience & Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand 2. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain 3. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot 4. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese 5. Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson…
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Someone has used my details to take out a mobile phone contract. (Anyone who knows me may laugh loudly at this juncture.) And insurance, because it’s important to be covered. (Laugh even louder). Sadly they got my bank account details wrong. (Ha, ha, ha – this is me laughing loudly). Although now I have to…
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On Saturday, a former army chaplain who became better-known recently for being Britain’s oldest man, died at his Staffordshire home, aged 110 years and 63 days. It was discovering stories such as Reg Dean’s that led me to develop the storyline for ‘I Stopped Time’, a novel that sees model-turned-photographer Lottie Pye reflecting on her…
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Word Book Night is promoting a rather wonderful New Year’s resolution: to read more. I managed to double my reading time by opening a paperback at the breakfast table instead of turning on the news. In On Writing, Stephen King has given me permission to be thoroughly unsociable because I am a writer. As a result…
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“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.” Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader.

Central to the final climax of These Fragile Things is the Great Storm of 1987, an event I felt I could bear personal witness to. At the time, it was claimed to have been the most destructive storm since 1703, although this has since been proven otherwise. The Great Storm of 1703 stuck so firmly…
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“The fortunate people in the world – the only really fortunate people in the world, in my mind – are those whose work is also their pleasure. The class is not a large one, not nearly so large as it is often represented to be; and authors are perhaps the most important elements in its…
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