Blog

  • Swiss Mountains…

    Scenic blog post alert… The past several weeks have been HOT here in N.E. Switzerland. 33-34°C every afternoon is a bit too much of a good thing – I wished several times I was halfway up a mountain, enjoying the snow squeaking under my feet. On the left we have our local mountain, the Säntis,…

  • Visiting Yorkshire and – new book!

    After the fraught journey to get to Leeds, I settled down in my hotel and started the week’s busy programme of book and family events. First up was meeting writer Carmen Radtke, who was on the blog a few months ago with a post about Australia and missing brides. We spent the afternoon on the…

  • Train travel in middle England…

    My journey from N.E. Switzerland to sunny Leeds didn’t start well. I arrived at Zürich Airport well on time, only to see DELAYED in large letters beside my flight. Ah, well. I’d allowed two and a half hours between landing at Luton and catching the first of three trains – where I had reserved seats,…

  • Statues (and things) in Switzerland…

    On Friday and Saturday I spent a few hours in Zug, Central Switzerland, on the way to and from Louise Mangos’ Strangers on a Bridge launch do. There’s a lot to like in Zug – a beautiful lake, a lovely historic old town – and some artwork. The old town first – above is the…

  • The Cold Cold Sea – a book with many covers…

    During the writing process, I’m not sure what I was expecting to see on the cover of my second book. It had various working titles along the way, until The Cold Cold Sea came to mind while I was looking at photos of Cornwall one day. I suppose I thought my book would look something…

  • Wild Orchids in Switzerland

    A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I went out in search of orchids… wild ones. Close to the Switzerland-Germany border, there’s a tiny place called Bargen. It’s known for being the most northerly village in the country, and also for its nearby woodland orchid trail. I have to confess I’d never heard of…

  • Sandra Danby and Connectedness…

    A couple of years ago, I met writer Sandra Danby on Twitter (where else…), and I’m very pleased to welcome her to the blog today to talk about her recently-published novel, Connectedness. The book is described as a tale of art, adoption, romance and loss moving between now and the Eighties, from London’s art world…

  • Haven Bridge and Miss Moonshine – The perfect ingredients for a heartwarming anthology!

    Back in 2014, I contributed a story to Winter Tales, an anthology published by a group of romance writers. It was great fun, so I was interested to hear from Helen Pollard, who needs no introduction to regular blog readers, that she was part of another group collaborating to produce an anthology with the intriguing…

  • A Fractured Winter… with Alison Baillie

    It’s lovely having guests on my blog, and even better when I know them in person as well as on social media. Alison Baillie lives a short train journey away from me, so she’s a ‘close’ friend in more ways than one, and here she is to tell us about her new book. Thank you,…

  • The Half-Bunny Pub…

    It happened years ago, somewhere in England. I was visiting friends; we’d been out for the day and were driving home again when someone suggested stopping for a drink. A hotel sign in the middle of the countryside presented itself, so we drove a hundred metres or so up a narrow lane to the the…

Got any book recommendations?