Moorish culture and legacy echoes through my new novel, Indiscretion, which is set in Andalusia, Spain, 1950, from the architecture of places that Alexandra visits to the princess costume she wears to a masked ball. Today, I take a look at the Moors of Spain, and why their influence has
The media has been all aflutter this week over comments made by the best-selling author Joanna Trollope at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai. In her speech she gave the opinion that writers create their best works after the age of thirty-five, when life has ‘knocked them about
In my new novel, Indiscretion, the heroine is a writer. So what better place for an intimate lunch between Alexandra and her estranged father than Hazlitt’s, I thought: the eighteenth-century hotel just off Piccadilly that has been a favourite haunt for writers over the years since it was home to
In an interview with Judith Spelman for Writing Magazine this month, author Emma Donoghue spoke on the subject of research for fiction-writing, an element of the writing process that she takes very seriously. She said: If you hope to find any interesting details about the time and place, you have
In my first novel, Burning Embers, the heroine Coral has inherited a plantation in Kenya. I so loved making her a mistress of a beautiful expanse of land, and describing the setting: an exotic and stunning backdrop for the love story that plays out. In my new novel, Indiscretion, the
Writer’s block is a strange beast indeed. The writer lives and breathes writing, and has done from an early age. All we want to do is write; it’s what makes us feel most alive, most ourselves, most fulfilled and peaceful inside. And yet some days, the words just won’t come.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be. –Miguel de Cervantes I was in my teens when I first began reading classic world literature, and when it came to Spanish literature, top of the list
From the blurb: Inspired by true events, the New York Times bestselling novel The Girl Who Came Home is the poignant story of a group of Irish emigrants aboard RMS Titanic—a seamless blend of fact and fiction that explores the tragedy’s impact and its lasting repercussions on survivors and their descendants. Ireland, 1912. Fourteen members
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