Category: On Writing
Putting Descartes In His Place
I want to tell you about the book that almost wasn’t written. The book I nearly gave up on before a word had been placed on the page. That book, my first book, has since been published in seven territories and was recently shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2017. All of this has […]
Mary Quaile: Why Don’t We Know About Her?
I am from a working class Irish family in Manchester. My parents – like many who came over and settled here – brought with them an oral tradition, and when our extended family gathered together in our small living room, they told stories, sometimes sang and danced, and often argued!. When I started scribbling stories […]
Writing The Happy Kitchen
Ever since my last major depressive episode just over a decade ago, I’ve sought to embrace a holistic attitude to my own mental health. For me it’s been a case of both ‘push’ and ‘pull’. ‘Push’, in the sense that, like many others, I’ve experienced some of the debilitating side-effects of antidepressant medication. These include […]
Changing Publishers
I tend to abide by the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” motto. I’ve held the same job for almost twenty years, been wearing my hair in the same style (give or take the bangs) most of my adult life, and I don’t immediately purchase “the next best thing” if my current devices are […]
The Midwife as Story Teller
Call the Midwife, the British television series is seen world- wide and has become popular in the United States. People who’d barely heard of midwives or thought they were old ladies who came to your log cabin back in the 1700s have become interested, even fascinated by the subject. Most people don’t know that the […]
Preserving Her Stories
Originally years ago, all I wanted to do was write books. My design changed one day in the mid-1990s when I realized the extent of stereotyping that exists in the West regarding the Middle East in general and the women of that region in particular. I was on transit at Heathrow Airport, on my way […]
Treasuring Memories
However you define the term ‘historical novel’, there can be few things more daunting than being asked to write about events which you yourself don’t remember, but which other people do. This was the position I was put in when I was commissioned to write a series of novels set during the Second World War. […]
How TV and Film Influence My Writing
‘How do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? No, we begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over you, Clarice? And don’t your eyes seek out the thing you want?’ For a generation of film lovers those words were etched into our brains […]
Displacement And Writing
Displacement is a central theme of my novel ‘Le Chateau’. The heroine, Charlotte is an Australian, living as an expatriate in France. But Charlotte is no ordinary expat, she has suffered an accident and cannot remember the past five years of her life. The life she returns to post hospital is very different to her […]
Dreams: Not Only For The Young
Well, I’ve done it. I fulfilled a lifelong dream. My first novel, Hostile Takeover: A Love Story just published. It took me a number of decades to get around to doing it as life and work got in the way. In fact, it took so many decades that the book comes out the same year I […]
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