For new visitors to the site, Welcome!  I am frankly astonished and delighted that so many people bother to follow my burblings, blogs and business.  Regular visitors who have almost certainly read this page before, should now skip to my latest blog, or whatever else interests them.  There will be new content under most of the buttons over the coming weeks.

 

I set this website up, as many readers know, because everyone told me it would help me sell more novels, and gradually persuade the world that I’m not a cook or restaurateur anymore,  but now an established novelist.  Well I doubt if it has done that. I still get more website requests for recipes than questions about how to be a published writer. But I do find myself doing far more talks about books than food these days, and I do have the occasional joy of a reader coming up to tell me that she (it’s usually a she) has read all my novels, and where is the next one?.  But a lot of readers still plaintively ask if I will write any more about food.

 

Sadly, the answer is No,  I haven’t the time to do both, and frankly, there are SUCH good cooks and chefs out there, there is not much point in competing. But the website is of course still full of food. Of course it is. One way and another I am still involved in food, and I’m just so greedy I can’t resist still appearing on the Great British Menu – the next series starts at Easter – and of course I still love cooking. So there are links to my other activities, past and present and to my blog, and the opportunity to tell me what you think. Of course I would prefer bouquets to brickbats, but any attention is better than none.

 

I turned 70 in February 2010, and became a Gran for the first time, so a lot is changing in my life. I hope you enjoy skipping about.  Let me know.. 

I’ve always, always wanted to write novels, but did not dare confess the fact, even to my husband. I satisfied the writing bug by writing cookbooks and journalism (and poems which no-one sees) until in my early fifties when I decided to sell my business, stop writing about food, and write that novel.

Quercus have also published by lates novels, Choral Society and A Serving of Scandal. Choral Societyt sold very well, especially in paperback. Waitrose knocked out over 7,000 of them and WHS gave them all sorts of promotions I’m gratified to say. It is about the lives and loves (and fears and dreams) of three women in their late fifties who meet in a singing group.

 

A Serving of Scandal,my latest and now out in paperback, is a novel about love and scandal (and the difficulty of sticking to honourable principles in the spin-controlled Westminster political village) and, thoufgh not doing as well as Choral Society, sells respectably. Maybe all the coverage of MPs expenses is helps. .  Or maybe the cover is. I love the cover! 

My last book, also published by Quercus,  isn't  a novel at all. It's a memoir, Relish, but it reads, I'm told, like a novel, and a pretty racy one at that.