Stolen
This novel was also scripted, by me, as a TV drama. In fact I can’t remember which came first, TV or book. Like “To Have and To Hold” it tackles another hard-hitting, controversial subject –in this...
View ArticleThe Stand-In
This is a thriller. I’d never written one before – introduce a gun and everything moves into different territory. The idea came to me when a film actress friend of mine told me about her stand-in, how...
View ArticleSeesaw
I like setting up a seemingly happy family and then planting a stick of dynamite in the corner of the room. Light the touch paper and watch what happens. In this, my eleventh novel, I set up a family...
View ArticleFinal Demand
This novel was prompted by a newspaper story I read, about a young woman who was charged with fraud. She worked at the British Telecom payments processing centre at Durham, and when cheques arrived...
View ArticleThe Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
This book came about because I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all. The population is ageing – for the first time the over 50s outnumber the rest of us –...
View ArticleIn the Dark
As I write this, the First World War is slipping out of memory and into history. Only five British servicemen are still with us – all aged over 106 – and soon these last witnesses will be gone. All...
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Tulip Fever
This novel was written in a rush of emotion; it’s really my love-letter to Dutch painting and that lost world of serene and dreamy domestic interiors. I hadn’t written a historical novel before, and...
View ArticleThe Ex-Wives
I loved writing this novel. I stole some of its jokes from my partner at the time, the cartoonist Mel Calman, himself the veteran of several marriages. Its main character, Russell Buffery, isn’t based...
View ArticleHeartbreak Hotel
Sometimes a character in an earlier book simply refuses to go away, hanging around long after the party’s over. Buffy, the boozy old actor in “The Ex-Wives”, was one of these. So I wrote him another...
View ArticleSomething to Hide
“Nobody in the world knows our secret… that I’ve ruined Bev’s life, and she’s ruined mine.” Petra’s romantic life has always been a car-crash, and even in her sixties she’s still capable of getting it...
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