Blog

Dear Reader,  I’m very excited to tell you about a new string to my writing bow. Having loved writing The Ivy Lane series and The Fabulous Forties Club series, I am super excited to step back in time with the gorgeous Irish Factory Girls series.  Set during WW2, the...

Autumn 1818, the Piacentine Hills  It was a square stone dwelling, remote from any town, with three windows on the first floor and one each side of the door. Built by someone with pretensions, maybe sixty years ago: the Count’s old estate manager, Leontina’s father...

INSPIRED BY A VOICE ‘The Gentleman’s Dilemma’ by Jane Dunn I love audiobooks; I particularly love my audiobooks and, like many keen listeners, the narrator, the voice, is as important as the story. When it’s right, it adds so much nuance to the character and so much...

This remarkable letter from December 1914 offers a real-life glimpse into the wartime efforts that inspired The Lifeboat Girls at War, bringing to life the vital work of Dorset’s Red Cross volunteers, the transformation of grand houses into hospitals for wounded...

Dear Reader,  It gives me tremendous pleasure to welcome you to Foxglove Hall, a place that has lived in my imagination and my heart for many years. It’s a place that feels real to me. I hope the characters and their stories will spring off the pages for...

The cider girls were keen to do their bit to support the war effort, so they were excited when they got the chance to go to Yeovil during Wings for Victory Week.  This was a nationwide fundraising event to help finance the construction of new aircraft for the war...

Researching Vienna in 1931 The first two novels in my Foreign Correspondent series are set in Berlin in 1930 and Vienna in 1931. Superficially, there are similarities between the two cities.  Most obviously, their inhabitants both speak German.  In the 1930s, they...

One of the many challenges of writing The First Kingdom Series, set in fifth-century Britain, is understanding what people believed before Christianity became the dominant religion. The main reason is that there is little, or at times no, written evidence of the gods...

Alas, it was all a dream... It’s a tired cliché when it appears in a story, and not very reliable as a source of inspiration. Many’s the time I’ve woken in the night and tried to cram the details of a vivid dream into my memory, only to discover the next morning that...