Storytelling in the blood

I’m from a line of women storytellers in the oral tradition. I write my stuff down because, unlike my foremothers, I can. I think everything is 'fiction', so my novels grow from real events and people, allowing me to explore themes of social class, gender, sexuality and reach for those voices missing from our cultural inheritance.

 
The first book I published, ‘The Things You Do’, is a memoir chronicling growing up a working-class lesbian at a time when those categories had different significance. 

My debut novel, ‘The Saddest Sound’, is the disturbing story of a serial killer stalking the north of England in the late 1970s but, atypically, it is told from the perspective of the women victims and survivors.  

My most recent novel, ‘The Portrait of Adie Denton’, is an inter-class, queer love story set largely in Paris, against the backdrop of the fabulously wealthy lesbian demi-monde. To place the work within a canon, it is Sarah Waters meets Armistead Maupin on the set of Upstairs Downstairs. The novel is the first part of an alternative family saga trilogy. This work is as yet unpublished. I am currently researching the second book in this series.

 

I’m lucky enough to be married to an accountant, so convinced of my talent as an author that she actually encouraged me to ditch my teaching job. We live happily in the rainy but glorious county of West Yorkshire.