About Isabel
Hello and welcome to my website, and if you got the address from the inside of 'A Vintage Affair' or my latest novel, 'The Very Picture of You' 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 spells in the theatre and in advertising, I got a job at the BBC. I had twelve very happy years at BBC World Service radio where I was a producer and reporter in the Features department and in Current Affairs. I travelled widely compiling documentaries in Central America, Australia, Africa and the Far East. I also wrote freelance articles for magazines and newspapers such as The Spectator, the Evening Standard, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph who, in 1997, commissioned me to write a comic, girl-about-town column, Tiffany Trott. Within a month of the first column appearing I'd been signed up by HarperCollins to turn Tiffany's adventures into a book. To my amazement HarperCollins then said they'd like another book, and another, and so somehow, without having set out to be a novelist, here I am.
In my novels self-deception is the main theme. That's why I write in the first person, because I love the fact that my heroine usually doesn't see what's really going on (or is pretending she doesn't) but the reader, gradually, does. So the reader is always one step ahead, 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 really is going on. By the end of the novel she either acknowledges, or is forced to face up to, the truth about who she truly is, or what she wants My books are all written with a combination of pathos and humour because that's true to life.
My New Novel
Ella Graham is a portrait painter who is starting to gain widespread recognition for her luminous and insightful likenesses. But when her newly engaged sister, Chloe, asks Ella to paint her American fiance, Nate, Ella is dismayed. She loathes Nate, and she distrusts him - painting him is the last thing she'd like to do. But she wants to make her fragile younger sister happy, and so she relucantly accepts. As they start to spend time together in the intimacy of the studio, Ella realises that there is more to Nate than meets the eye. At the same time she's learning about her other sitters' lives: there's an elderly window with a wartime secret, a beautiful French woman who's dreading turning forty, and a handsome politician who has a confession to make. Then out of the blue comes a message from Ella's father John, who abandoned her and her mother when Ella was five. In the meantime Chloe is planning her dream wedding: and as the day draws ever nearer Ella realises, to her horror, that she is falling in love with the one man she shouldn't...
And Finally...
A bit about me. I live in London, very close to Portobello Road, with my partner Greg, our two young children and my two teenage stepsons. In my spare time I play table football.
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