When I was a little girl, my bedroom had a spectacular view of the ocean. I would regularly sit at the window and daydream, enchanted by the blue of the waves and the dancing of the sun’s rays on the surface. When I grew up, I spread my wings and
I hope you enjoy the book trailer for The Echoes of Love. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, and please do share if you’d like to.
St. Martin, born in AD 316, was a kind and humble member of the Roman guard who became a Christian saint. He built monasteries at Ligugè and Mamontier, and served as the bishop of Tours (he is buried in the cathedral there). So goes the legend, on a dismal 11th
In recent months I’ve been immersed in all things Venetian, from art to architecture, cuisine to customs, music to elements of language, as I prepared my book The Echoes of Love for publication on 6th December. Did you know that the Venetians have their own language? Venetian is a Romance
From the blurb: Killed in Action – the most dreaded words imaginable for a soldier’s wife. Jess Albert has been living with them for four years, since the death of her husband in Afghanistan. Finding blessed numbness in routine, she doesn’t dare to look ahead, any more than she can
I first visited Venice as a young child. Then, as now, I was wide-eyed and enchanted by the beauty of the city. I distinctly remember standing in the main square, the Piazza St Marco, gazing up at the stunning architecture of Saint Mark’s Basilica, and feeling I had somehow entered
Open my heart and you will see, Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’. So wrote the poet Robert Browning. Perhaps my favourite poet of all time is Robert’s wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially her love poems, of which Robert was the subject. So I am well familiar with this Victorian poet,
My university degree was in French Literature, so it was inevitable that I would read the works of French journalist Gaston Leroux. Leroux (1868–1927) was a born and bred Parisian with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of his home city, gleaned through years working as a court reporter and theatre critic for L’Écho de Paris. He
In my new novel The Echoes of Love, my heroine, Venetia, is an architect by trade who specialises in the restoration of historical mosaics. My choice of profession for my protagonist was quite deliberate. First, I wanted Venetia to be intelligent, creative, hardworking and determined, as of course all students
From the blurb: A hardcore science fiction writer and a soft-hearted romance novelist clash on the sunny South African coast… Margaret Parker is a hopeless romantic whose fantasies fuel her writing. For Graham Connelly, science fiction is the perfect genre to express his cynical world view. A chance meeting in
Regular readers of my blog will know that I love poetry, and what better occasion than Halloween to delve into the archives and pull out a few of my favourites for conjuring up the magical feeling of this time of year? First of all, who could resist that most classic
How did I learn how to write? By studying the craft of other writers, first and foremost – voraciously reading across genres from an early age, and studying literature through my schooling and at university. But along the way, like most writers, I’ve picked up the odd tome on writing
Top of my ‘to see’ list for films is the new movie Saving Mr Banks, which just premiered at the close of the British Film Institute London Film Festival and is released in cinemas in late November. The film tells the story of the making of Disney’s seminal film Mary
From the blurb: Mistress Cooksley may be a wealthy merchant’s daughter, but she blushes at my words and meets my eyes look for look. Yet I cannot hope to court her without fortune, and a dalliance with a pretty maid will not hinder me from my path. Captain Drake’s endeavour
Before I start writing a book, I always know three things: * The story * The title * The epigraph These, for me, are the foundations from which the writing is built. Choosing the epigraph is an important task for me, and one I enjoy immensely. I am an avid
Of all the mythical creatures – and there are many – the nymph has always been one of my favourites. What image does the word nymph conjure up for you? Perhaps something like this vision, painted by John William Waterhouse: A nymph is a female deity, but a minor one.
If you’ve read any one of my novels, you’ll know that I root my fiction in a strong sense of place. The settings for my stories are not merely scenic backdrops, like two-dimensional paintings on a theatre set. They are vibrant and vivid – as real as I can make
I do not know that I would be a writer today were it not for fairy tales. I was fortunate to have parents who had a well-stocked library and who believed in reading to their daughters; it was on their knees, as a very young child, that I discovered the
What’s the single most important element of a romance novel? Love. Not only must the love story that unfolds between the hero and heroine be compelling and moving and epic, but it must also cause the reader to fall in love a little herself. What is the reason for the
‘What’s the formula for a bestselling book?’ So read an attention-grabbing headline in the Guardian last week. The article was prompted by a list of those books that have sold more than 250,000 copies in the UK since 2000, compiled by Specsavers for their inaugural ‘Bestseller Awards’ (I confess I
In 1899, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud published a book entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he laid out his theory of how dream interpretation can allow one to explore the unconscious. His belief – which slowly became a talking point among academics and doctors of the mind – was that we
Welcome to my blog, and thank you for stopping by on this Best of 2016 Giveaway Hop. It took me some time to decide on a giveaway for this hop, because there were so many books I enjoyed in 2016, but finally I settled on Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s
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