An Author's Notebook

Chiselling away... page one! Just when you thought An Author's Notebook might have died and gone to blog heaven... here I am! The r...

Whenever I succumb to a bit of navel-gazing, the subject is always the same. How to be happy. You'd have thought I'd got it sussed b...

A much-loved grandmother leaves behind a precious legacy. My own one passed away a few years ago, but every so often I honour her memory by ...

Available on Amazon 6/6/16 On Monday the 6 June, my latest novel, The Puppet Master , will be published on Kindle. It tells the story of...

One of my earliest memories is playing happily in a friend's garden before being unceremoniously yanked inside by our panic-stricken mot...

I am immersed in what I hope will be the final edit of my second novel. At this point in the process, I am trying to look at the 'arc...

Yesterday was a significant day for me. I sent my new novel out into the world on the wings of an email. The laptop even made that little wh...

Notes from the Henley Literary Festival...  A few years ago an editor friend of mine at Headline Review sent me a copy of My Last Duches...

Today I am posting an excerpt from my new novel about a young woman trapped in a ruinous marriage in Jakarta, Indonesia, during the 1970s.  ...

A few weeks ago Marlow FM radio station invited me onto its Book Club programme to chat about my novel, A Sister for Margot . Other than pro...

Imagine the scenario for a moment. A Russian aristocratic woman meets with a life coach. Note that the light has been extinguished from her ...

The news sites  Ibiza Spotlight  and The Ibiza Sun  have both marked the launch of my new novel,   A Sister for Margot . The island of Ibiza...

Gao Gajah: water for purifying yourself before entering the temple   Back in the late 1970s, when my parents lived in Jakarta, we used t...

Earlier this year I joined Twitter. One of my first followers (a friend) welcomed me to the site and dropped #twitteramateur into her t...

  On a beautiful, sunny day in Ibiza some years back, I started to compose my first novel on a Palm Pilot with an impossibly s...