I have always enjoyed fiction which offers multiple points of view on a story. It is traditional in the romance genre to tell a story from the heroine’s point of view, but keeping solely in that perspective limits the story. It’s so enriching to know what the hero is thinking and feeling; how he interprets events; how his own heart aches and yearns and loves deeply.

With each novel I write, I find myself stepping a little further, a little more often, into the male perspective. But with Concerto, my new novel, I felt a need like never before to tell the story from the hero’s point of view.

At the start of the book, Umberto is a strong, confident – overconfident – young man with the world at his feet. He’s wealthy, he’s handsome, he’s extremely talented and he’s enjoying stratospheric success as a pianist and composer. This is a man who drives a red Maserati around the streets of Nice and enjoys the attention he draws, especially from women.

But when that sports car ends up wrapped around a tree, everything changes for Umberto. An injury to his brain leaves him blind. When Catriona, the heroine of the book, is commissioned to work with him in the capacity of music therapist, Umberto has already spent years and years wallowing in misery over everything he lost in the accident. For Umberto, it was not just his vision he lost, but so much more; he is tormented by what could have been, should have been. He is bitter, angry, unable to love and to receive love, unable to allow himself to so much as touch a piano.

How could I tell the story of Catriona and Umberto through only Catriona’s eyes? After all, while she has her own burdens, she is not in despair like him, lost like him. And she is not blind, like him.

I was very conscious as I wrote Concerto that Umberto has been limited through the loss of his sight, and I felt that to mute him by not giving him a voice in the story would be wrong – it would limit him further.

The parts of the book I tell from Umberto’s point of view were not always easy to write. The world is black for Umberto. He cannot see his beautiful home on Lake Como. He cannot see his beloved piano.

He is a man in immense pain, and sometimes he acts out from that place of pain. He feels trapped, powerless, and constantly frustrated. I write:

He punched the side of the table with his fist, grazing and bruising his knuckles in the process, wishing he could put his hands on something he could smash into a thousand pieces. Bad idea … it only alleviated his rage for brief moments and then the frustration came flooding back. Keeping him awake at night, the feeling rarely faded with the heralding of day. He was used to it now; it was his familiar protean sprite, his companion in light and in darkness.

The role of a romance author is to create a hero whom the heroine can love – and, of course, the reader also. He must be loveable. Umberto, at a glance, may seem hard to love. He drinks too much, he falls into dangerously low moods, he can be rude and caustic. But through Umberto’s point-of-view sections, I offer the reader a chance to see what lies beyond his behaviour, what lies at his core:

Grief. Yearning. Vulnerability. Plus, a deep capacity for love – and even, potentially, with Catriona’s love and support, for hope.