Monthly Archives: November 2013

The beach at Dungerness

The beach at Dungerness

“Novelists are rather like physicists. They sit around with their feet on the radiator staring out of the window with a notepad within reach.

They must be in that world of misty, drifting creative thinking that has a bit of talent, a bit of luck, a bit of being shaped by current mood that can bring sudden insight. To wonder how to progress or even start a novel is to enter a state of what V.S. Pritchett called determined stupor.” Ian McEwan.

Dungerness, an enigmatic, beautiful  and eerie place in south east England,  the setting for my new novel in progress, The Eavesdroppers.



Beech clumps, beech nuts and beech roots. Oxfordshire.

‘The time of objects floating down from above began. Fall, they called it in America.  Autumn arrived slowly in Billingsford. Leaves coloured up like chameleons, red chasing green, chasing yellow, before collapsing into brown. The eerie sense of curling and shrinking grew stronger as the last drops of moisture were squeezed from exhausted veins and dead leaves clung to the trees, each hanging by a thread until that first wet weekend in November when rain slathered mud onto the pavement and autumn was suddenly winter.’

The Insistent Garden.