About Isabel.

Ghostwritten by Isabel Wolff

Thank you for visiting my website and for your interest in my books. 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. My earlier novels are romantic comedies: they have a catch in the throat - my heroines have always seen the sad side of life - but they're definitely lighter reading. Now, from A Vintage Affair onwards, I've moved towards novels set in the present and the past, Ghostwritten, which I set on wartime Java, being my most historical novel to date.

A bit about my personal life; I live in London, very close to Portobello Road, with my partner Greg, our two young children, and my younger stepson. In my spare time I play table football and charge round the park with our Cocker Spaniel, Alfie.

Ghostwritten by Isabel Wolff

My New Novel

Jenni is ‘ghost’ writing the lives of other people. It’s a job that suits her well - still haunted by a childhood tragedy, she finds it easier to take refuge in the memories of others than to dwell on her own. Klara was a child in the Second World War, interned in a camp on Java during the Japanese occupation. She has never spoken of her experiences there, but as she turns eighty, she knows that the time has come to share her extraordinary story of survival. As Jenni helps Klara to shed light on her childhood, and a neglected part of world history, she is forced to explore her own past, too. Can Jenni and Klara help each other to lay the ghosts of their pasts to rest?

 

What Readers Think...

"Isabel Wolff... has created a tale which accurately and movingly depicts the world of a ghostwriter. A gripping page-turner from page one."
Andrew Crofts, leading ghostwriter

"I found this book remarkable in the way it moved me... I found it completely believable, horrifying and both saddening and uplifting."
Penny Waugh, on Amazon Vine

"I really loved this book and found it very easy to read, despite the subject matter which at times is harrowing."
Nicola, on Amazon Vine

"I was so impressed by it. It’s not just a book about ghostwriting or Japanese internment camps, but also a book about friendship and love, about learning to forgive and to move on with life."
Helen S., on Amazon Vine

"I find the writing beautiful and genuinely moving and evocative in telling the stories of two women. One is Klara who lost her childhood in a camp but managed to survive and raise a great family in Cornwall; the other is Jenni who suffered a terrible personal loss on holiday in Cornwall and who is living with the ghosts of the past."
Ellie Haworth, on Amazon

"The most wonderful book I have read in ages."
A.E. Crawley, on Amazon

"I was very moved by this beautiful book."
Marjolein Balm, MarjoleinBookBlog