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Nowadays I live in London with my husband, two children and five cats, but I was born and grew up on the small British island of Guernsey in the English Channel.
My mother was a professional landscape artist, who spent her life painting the beautiful beaches and countryside of Guernsey. And so, I grew up in an environment where it was a very normal thing to want to make a living from your art. Which is just as well, because I’m someone who always knew she wanted to be a writer, and if I’d had parents who’d harboured hopes of me becoming a tax accountant or a corporate lawyer, they’d have been sorely disappointed.
I’ve been obsessed with books and words since the day I first learned to read, and grew up on classic children’s authors like Enid Blyton and Edith Nesbit. As I got older I began to gravitate towards love stories with gripping plots, devouring novels like Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Katharine, Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, about clever, independent-minded women caught up in passionate affairs with complex, Byronic men. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic, and my favourite novels are beautiful, intelligent love stories that combine a gripping plot with gorgeous prose and wonderful historical detail to lose yourself in.
I was a keen writer myself from an early age, penning copious stories and poems – as well as plays to be performed in the field behind our house, with parts for me and my younger brother and sister, but always with myself in the starring role (of course!). My love of language developed into an interest in foreign languages, and I went on to study French and German at university, then to live and study in Germany for several years afterwards. Most recently I worked as a journalist, starting my career at the Guernsey Evening Press and ending up at Dow Jones News writing for the newswire and The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Throughout university, I studied 1900-1945 European history and culture – a period that continues to fascinate me. I always knew that when I eventually wrote my first novel it would be a novel of historical fiction set during WW1 involving a shell-shocked soldier, and that it would be first and foremost a love story, which is what my first novel, Beyond the Moon evolved into.
Growing up on Guernsey, the evidence of the German Occupation of the island in WW2 lay all around us, and, as kids, exploring the dank old bunkers and gun emplacements was one of the main entertainments. But they always intrigued me beyond this. Who were these men, and what brought them to Guernsey? And why did my own family have to hurriedly evacuate to England in summer 1940 because of them? As I grew older I discovered that WW2 involved far more than the just the invasion of Guernsey, and that the war was in fact the most seismic and destructive event in human history.
And from my fascination with WW2 – rooted in my childhood in Guernsey and deepened by time spent in Germany – The Many Seas to Guernsey slowly began to take shape. From the start I wanted it to be a novel exploring both British and German experiences of the war, and I hope it offers something of that perspective.
I’ve already begun the next book in the duology, which continues Kitty and Lukas’ story, and will cover the Occupation of Guernsey and the war years. I hope you enjoy my novels as much as I loved writing them. I love to hear from readers, so please do get in touch.
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