‘Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.’ So wrote the poet Robert Browning.

In my new book, Concerto, the beautiful, all-encompassing love of the mother is a foundation for the story. There are three mothers in Concerto: the heroine and her mother, and the hero’s mother. Each is a fierce lioness when it comes to protecting her child.

The heroine, Catriona, is a single mother. For Catriona, her son is everything – her whole world; the best ‘mistake’ she ever made.

Catriona’s mother, Marguerite, never expected her daughter to fall pregnant at eighteen. She was, however, in part responsible for Catriona’s naivety at that age. I write:

Marguerite de Vere had made sure that her daughter was so shielded from the realities of life that at the age of eighteen Catriona was still innocent, unaware of the pitfalls of love, ignorant of the harsher aspects of life.

Marguerite is Catriona’s rock as she brings up her son, Michael, and builds a brilliant career as a music therapist. Catriona is deeply grateful to her mother: ‘thanks to the sagacity of her mother, she was a strong, confident and independent woman’.

Indeed, strong and independent women abound in Concerto. Umberto, the hero, is the son of a famous opera singer, Calandra Rolando Monteverdi, and there is nothing she wouldn’t do for her son. A diva of the highest order, Calandra is used to getting her way, and she has set her sights on hiring Catriona. Following a car accident, Umberto has become blind. He is depressed and unable to so much as touch a piano, let alone compose as he once did so beautifully. Calandra wants Catriona to heal her son.

But how can Catriona leave her own son, Michael, to take on this work? She refuses Calandra, placing her own son’s needs first. Calandra is desperate; she is dying. She writes to Catriona:

I write to you today knowing that hours from now I shall no more be of this world. The words you are reading are those of a dying mother who has never loved anybody more than her only son, Umberto. … Please don’t deny me again. You must be a kind and compassionate person to be in your sort of job, so I beg of you, do not ignore the wishes of a dying woman and may God bless you for saving my child.

This is the love of which Christina Rossetti wrote in her poem ‘Sonnets Are Full of Love’.

Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.

‘Save my child.’ It is difficult to imagine any mother refusing this agonised plea and denying a dying mother her only wish.

I write of love every day; of romance and passion. I am a romance novelist, after all. But Concerto provided me with a wonderful opportunity to write about that ‘first Love’, as Rossetti describes it; of she ‘whose heart is my heart’s quiet home’.

Calandra has done all she can for her son; Marguerite will do all she can to support her daughter, including caring for Michael. And Catriona? Where will the ‘blessed glow’ in her heart lead her?

One way or another, a mother’s love will be intrinsic to the unfolding of the story, for ‘all love begins and ends there’.