Introduction

Lies and Loyalties is the title of my new novel to be published in April 2008. It’s about a family of four brothers and one sister, an MP, a QC, a Catholic priest, a brother who suffers from mental problems and his wife who at the beginning of the novel is resident in Her Majesty’s Prison Holloway. I’ve always been interested in the gap between the haves and have nots, between the comfortable and the disturbed. I may have caught that interest from my father, Lord Longford (see Longford Trust) who spent most of his later life trying to help prisoners. Now I’m involved with my work for Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners.

Lies, loyalties and love probably are the themes of most of my novels – obsessional love, serious lies and (mostly) family loyalties. To which I guess I’d have to add violence. Not that I’ve ever written the same novel twice. My last dozen novels have included: the story of a random act of violence in which the attacker leaves prison and searches for his victim, Bodily Harm; a passionate love affair partly set in Chile, One Summer; a sequel to Jane Austen’s, Emma, called Perfect Happiness (Emma & Knightley in US) which is the not very convincing last line of Austen’s superb novel. Then there’s The Space Between which examines the prospects of a young widow (lies) and A Woman’s Life which is a study of friendship (loyalties) between three women over forty years. They come from America, Ireland and England but their lives interweave over forty years.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a saga novel called A Woman’s Age which followed the lives of three generations of Englishwomen, kicking off in 1910. I suppose that was the nearest I’ve got to writing a book about feminism but women have often been at the centre of my work. Occasion of Sin, a tragic love story was actually an up to date telling of Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina. In my version Anna gets back on the train. I shan’t go through all my novels here but there are a couple more I’d like to mention. The Garish Day has a man, a diplomat, at its centre and deals with four decades and as many countries. Magic and Fate is my stab at magic realism, although in fact a lot of it, particularly the super model heroine took a great deal of research. Luckily, the doyenne of the catwalks, Suzy Menkes, (fashion editor of the Herald Tribune) took me under her wing. Writing about Magic and Fate reminds me to put in a note about the importance of entertainment- even fun – in novels, even those with serious themes. I often think that the reason that childrens’ books have become so popular with adults that the authors know very well that no child will stick with a book that doesn’t entertain them. I began writing childrens’ books to entertain my own children – they did the first illustrations as I read them aloud (a practise I highly recommend) and now I’m looking to my grandchildren. My latest novels for the 8-11 age group are both adventure stories with a touch of fantasy, Far-Out and There’s More to Life. I am currently working on a series of adventure stories for the 5/6 yr. olds. Finally, as this is my first attempt at a website, please feel free to tell me what interests you, what I could have left out and what I failed to put in. My plan, for those who are still with me, is to write randomly about things that interest me – not necessarily literary. Above all, novelists need to be eclectic.