In our back garden, almost on the boundary with our neighbour’s garden, stands a lone horse chestnut tree. It has been here longer than our house, and our house first appeared on an Ordnance Survey map in 1903. This is the time of year when the tree is just coming into leaf and, as they…
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I’m delighted to welcome Ivan Wainewright to Virtual Book Club, my occasional interview series in which authors have the opportunity to pitch their novels to your book club. Ivan lives in Kent with his partner, Sarah, and their neurotic rescue Staffie, Remi. Before moving to Kent, he lived in North London, Leeds and Singapore. He…
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The discovery that Mitcham – only three miles from where I live – was once the opium-growing capital of the UK made me decide that Small Eden’s leading man, Robert Cooke, should be a physic (or physick) gardener. The term has fallen out of use, but it means a grower of medicinal or healing plants….
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No eden, small or large, would be complete without birds. Several species feature in Small Eden. First, we have the songbirds in the hedgerows and the pleasure gardens. There’s Hettie’s grey African parrot Fairfax (a personality in his own right). And then we have the green ring-necked parakeets Robert buys for his pleasure garden. I…
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My tenth novel is a personal one. With Small Eden, I have written yet more characters into my local landscape – the land on which our cottage is built. When we moved into the cottage, the vendors told us that it had been the gatehouse for an estate, and this was certainly the received wisdom,…
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I felt very strongly that the cover for Small Eden should have a strong local anchor. The inspiration for my tenth novel was the cottage I have called home for the past twenty-one years, built (as far as we’ve been able to ascertain) as the ticket office for pleasure gardens which opened at the turn…
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What if the person you thought you’d lost forever walked back into your life? That’s the question Katy Regan asks in her latest novel, How to Find Your Way Home. Once I discovered that the book involved birdwatching, a subject I wrote about in A Funeral for an Owl, I knew that I needed to…
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Imagine, if you will, discovering of a cache of photographs; the instinctive knowledge that what you are holding in your hands is rare and precious. You won’t be the first to experience this feeling, but that hardly matters. It will feel as though you are. Anthony Penrose grew up thinking that he had one famous…
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When I released I Stopped Time, it was to test the waters. And by ‘the waters’, I mean what was then the brave new world of self-publishing. I commissioned a cover design, choosing a photograph that was appropriate to the era and included the themes of time and photography. The result was in keeping with…
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I’m delighted to welcome JJ Marsh (Jill) to Virtual Book Club, my author interview series which gives authors the opportunity to pitch their books to your book club, be it virtual or real.  As an English teacher, actor, director and cultural trainer, Jill has lived and worked all over Europe. Now she’s a full-time author, publisher…
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