About Isabel

Hello and welcome to my website, and if you got the address from the inside of 'Forget Me Not' or my latest novel, 'A Vintage Affair', then thank you so much for buying my books!

Here, briefly, is the gen about me. I was born in Warwickshire, read English at Cambridge and, after five years as a struggling actress I got a 'proper job' at the BBC. I had twelve very happy years at the World Service, where I was a producer, then reporter in News and Current Affairs. I travelled widely compiling documentaries in Central America, Africa and the Far East. I also wrote freelance features for many magazines and newspapers such as The Spectator, The Evening Standard, and The Daily Telegraph who, in 1997, commissioned me to write a comic column, 'Tiffany Trott'. Within a month of the first column appearing, I'd been contracted by HarperCollins to turn Tiffany's adventures - or rather misadventures - into a book. To my amazement, HarperCollins then wanted another book, and another, and another and so somehow, without ever having set out to be a novelist, here I am.

In my novels self-deception is the main theme - the difficult journey from lack of insight into one's own behaviour, to wisdom and self-knowledge. That's why I write in the first person. I love the fact that my heroine usually doesn't see what's really going on. She doesn't 'get it' (or is pretending she doesn't) but the reader, gradually, does. So the reader is always just one step ahead, working it out, or seeing through the evident ambivalence of my heroine, or the naked guise. For writing in the first person opens up an ironic gap between what my heroine says and what she clearly feels, or between what she thinks is going on around her, and what actually is going on. We can all be self-deceiving, seemingly only what we want to see, and by the end of the novel the heroine finally sees, or is forced to face up to, the truth about who she truly is and what she wants. I write with a combination of humour and pathos because that's true to life.

Although the books are all written (so far) in the first person, they are not introverted, stream-of-consciousness novels, but romantic comedies with dramatic set pieces - weddings, christenings, charity balls, dog shows - and a number of on-going plotlines, which I weave together as if for a film. And this is the really hard part - the planning and structuring, because each book has to be very carefully worked out. But once I've cracked the main plot and the various sub-plots that shoot off from that, then the writing is actually great fun. That's when my characters truly come alive.

My New Novel

The heroine of my eighth novel, Phoebe Swift, is a textiles and costumes expert who has just opened her own vintage dress shop, Village Vintage, in Blackheath. But as Phoebe arranges the beautiful vintage gowns and suits she is struggling to come to terms with a recent trauma - the loss of her best friend, Emma. One day Phoebe goes to see an elderly Frenchwoman, Mrs Bell, who has a collection of lovely clothes to sell - all except for one garment that she won't part with, a child's sky blue winter coat from the early 1940s. As Phoebe gets to know Mrs Bell, she learns the sad story behind this little blue coat, not realising that it is to have a have a profound and uplifting connection with her own life.

'A Vintage Affair' will be published by Harper on 7th February 2009, and there's a special promotion with Phase Eight throughout February and March in which every reader will get 20% off Phase Eight's new spring collection - just take along the tear-out voucher in the back of the book.

And Finally...

A bit about me. I live in London with my partner, Greg, our five year old daughter Alice, and our two year old son, Edmund. In my spare time I play in the sandpit and go down the slide. I also enjoy playing the piano, tennis and table football.

Finally, I'm often asked for tips on how to become a writer. So I've encapsulated all the advice I can think of in my 'Guide to Writing And Getting Published'. Do click on it, all you aspiring novelists out there, and I hope it will give you some encouragement and that you'll soon be hammering the keyboard yourselves!