About Isabel

Hello and welcome to my website, and if you got the address from the inside of 'A Question of Love' or my latest novel, 'Forget Me Not', 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 seventh novel 'Forget Me Not', Anna Temple, is a garden designer, who is becoming well known for her elegant designs, whether of small city gardens, or grand country landscapes. She is also single mother to Milly, two and a half, whose father, Xan, is frustratingly absent. Anna, realising that Milly needs a father figure in her life falls for Patrick Gilchrist, a successful entrepreneur, and amateur bee-keeper. He seems to be the answer to her problems, but is he as sweet as he seems? And what is Anna's feckless younger sister, Cassie, up to, and what is their widowed father hiding from them both?

I've been hugely helped in my research for Forget-me-not by the garden designer, Charlotte Rowe, whose wonderful garden designs can be seen at her website, www.charlotterowe.com

Forget-me-not will be published in trade paperback in March 2007, and in smaller paperback in October 2007.

British Council visit to Russia

Last September I was very honoured to be invited by the British Council to go to St. Petersburg to appear at the 'Fashionable Reading - Modern British Writers' week organised by the British Consulate and by my Russian publishers, Amphora, along with Irvine Welsh. I also visited the Moscow International Book Fair for a couple of days. In St. Petersburg we had a week of discussions, internet chats and readings, and if you'd like to read about it click here or on the link in the sidebar.

And Finally...

A bit about me. I live in West London with my partner, Greg, our little girl, Alice and our second baby, Edmund - born in mid-October 2006. 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!