About Me

Hello there, thanks for dropping by.  A huge welcome…I’m delighted you’re here.

I write funny, honest books about ordinary women and family life. When I’m not doing that, I can be seen haring across the Surrey hills trying to stop my lab/schnauzer eating other people’s picnics or running off with their kites. Or helping my teenage son think back to when he might last have seen his rugby shorts. Or explaining to my daughter that I can help with English, Latin and Spanish but art, technology or, ugh, sewing, she’s on her own. Or telling my very tolerant husband that the dog needs organic chicken because she’s got a sensitive stomach but could he make do with an omelette?

But I wasn’t always a writer. Once I left my hometown of Peterborough to go to university in Bath, I got the travel bug and have never recovered. I was an English teacher in Spain and Corsica, a holiday rep in Tuscany, a PA in an art school in Florence, a guidebook researcher and author, travel journalist. Horizons, broad, exciting, unknown and promising were what inspired me. Nothing thrilled or terrified me quite as much as landing in a foreign country with a whole new territory to discover.

And then the children arrived…and with them disappeared the days of elephant riding in Thailand, testing new theme park rides in America and abseiling down the highest tower in Rotterdam.  So I had to find new ways of exploring far-flung lands. After working as a book reviewer for Candis magazine, I realised fiction was the way to keep that sense of anticipation and excitement alive.

When the children were young, the challenge was finding the time to write. Now both are at senior school, the challenge is to write down the funny (and sometimes hideous) things they say before I forget in case I need to use them in a novel – in our house, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Even the dog has to make friends on the hill so that I can talk to their owners about books. So if you see otherwise sane-looking women leaping into hedges and hiding behind oak trees on the Surrey Downs, they’ve probably spotted me heading their way with my latest book recommendation…

Other than reading and writing, I love cooking, entertaining, wine and friends…I’m more like Clover than Jen1 – not very groomed and a bit messy, though I don’t have wellies in my kitchen sink. Or a trust fund…

Thank you so much for visiting my website – I do love to hear from readers, so feel free to get in touch through the contact form, or come and find me on Facebook or Twitter.