My first piece of non-fiction describes a disaster that happened through a lack of collective love

My first two novels dramatise what happens when we don’t talk about love

THE ARISTOCRAT & THE ABLE SEAMAN is my first piece of non-fiction. It tells the true story of two courageous Titanic survivors – one of whom was my great-grandmother. It’s also my attempt to reveal the stark truth behind what went wrong the night Titanic sank. The book is available from April, 2026, from The History Press.

THE DANCE of LOVE is set in the British, Edwardian, aristocratic Downton-Abbey society whose strict rules the novel’s protagonist, the young, spirited and beautiful Natalie Edwardes, wants to outwit. It was published in 2014 by Buried River Press. Joffe Books published a new edition in 2019. You can order the novel from amazon as an ebook here or paperback, in its first edition, here.

SPEAKING of LOVE is a novel that asks why we fail to find the courage to say the things that matter the most. It was shortlisted for Spread the Word’s Books to Talk About in 2008 and sold 4,000 copies. Sadly its publisher, Beautiful Books, went out of business in 2011. It was reissued as an ebook through amazon, where you can also find second-hand copies.

My third and fourth novels are in different stages of progress.

These novels are different in tone and voice, era and setting, but the thing they all have in common is the difficulty we have when we try to talk about love.

I contributed an original creation myth to the JUST WHEN? STORIES in 2010 and, in 1995, I wrote a 30,000-word ending to Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel, THE BUCCANEERS.

Between January 2016 and December 2018 I contributed a story each month to Visual Verse, an Anthology of Art & Words. The stories had to be written inside an hour which showed me I could write a story very quickly. So, who knows, these shorts might become the nucleus for longer stories one day ... .