Category: Newest

Walking the dog

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While I was writing my new novel, The Perfect Date, I gave it the working title The Dog Walker. Caz, the central character, is a professional dog walker, and it opens with her rescue dog discovering a body early one morning up on Brighton Racecourse.

She realises with horror that it's the man she met through a dating app, the Perfect Date she was due to see again that very evening. But worse – far worse – is that this is the second time this has happened to someone she was seeing. Is it a horrible coincidence? Or is there something else going on?

The Daughters by Julia Crouch

One Year, Two Books

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The New Mother by Julia Crouch
The Daughters by Julia Crouch

How long does it take to write a novel?

My first book Cuckoo took me my entire life up to that point. The next three: Every Vow You Break, Tarnished and The Long Fall took me a year each. The fifth, her Husband’s Lover, thanks to a false start, took two years. Then the sixth took four years to write. Indeed, it needs another draft, which I will attend to soon, but I don’t want to talk about that now.… read more

A Sense of Place

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Reuben Powell Claydon House Heygate Estate

Claydon House, Heygate Estate, by Reuben Powell. For more of his work, go to Hotel Elephant http://hotelelephantgallery.blogspot.co.uk/

When I’m thinking of a new story, I usually start with a ‘what if’ question – what if you couldn’t remember parts of your childhood? (Tarnished) ‘What if, sixteen years down the line, you bumped into the man you nearly left your husband for (indeed, your own personal ‘what if’) and you still had that deep chemistry thing going on?’… read more

Her Husband’s Lover Playlist – Why

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In which I explain my reasoning behind choosing the playlist I posted yesterday:

playlist-composite

Straight to You

Nick Cave

As part of writing Her Husband’s Lover, I wrote what I now see as a ‘warm up novel’.

This novel is now filed in ‘strong but wrong’. It strayed into a dark, dystopian territory – too far for me. It wasn’t time wasted though – I took certain parts and brought them forward into the ‘right’ novel, and am refashioning a lot of the discarded scraps into something quite different.… read more

Her Husband’s Lover Playlist

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Last month, I was invited to put together a playlist of songs that inspired Her Husband’s Lover. This was for a great local radio programme – The Write Songs, hosted on Radio Reverb by Gilly Smith. Here is the playlist. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the reasoning behind the choices, and later this week I’ll link to the radio programme. Enjoy!

CUCKOO – just 99p

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cuckoo_cover_final

My first novel Cuckoo is an Amazon Kindle daily deal today, Saturday 27 August. Buy it now for just 99p.

Rose has it all – the gorgeous children, the husband, the beautiful home. But then her best friend Polly comes to stay.

Very soon, Rose’s cosy world starts to fall apart at the seams – her baby falls dangerously ill, her husband is distracted – is Polly behind it all?

It appears that once you invite Polly into your home, it’s very difficult to get her out again…

A brilliant debut novel… a riveting and spooky story that keeps your eyes locked on the page, and leaves you feeling shaken and out of sorts  Heat Magazine, March 1st, 2011