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Playing James was my first novel. I wrote it around the time of the first Big Brother when everyone was becoming obsessed with fly-on-the-wall documentaries. I thought it would be fun to describe how a reporter is assigned to shadow the life of a policeman, in order to write a daily column for her paper. They hate each other but not for long...

Playing James won the Parker Romantic Novel of the Year 2003

Set on the glorious estate of Pantiles, The Party Season was inspired by a mix of things - people presuming you must be very rich if you own an enormous house, and re-visiting your childhood through grown up eyes. The two childhood friends in this case are Simon and Izzy.

I particularly loved writing about Aunt Winnie – as someone asks of her character, ‘Oh, Winnie – what a quaint name! Is that as in the Pooh?’ Winnie fixes them with a steely gaze. ‘No. As in Mandela.’

I was in America sitting on a bus, feeling bored and picked up a discarded newspaper. In it was a horrific story about a man who had taken his revenge on a judge by deliberately seducing his daughter. Not a nice story but I thought it might have lots of scope and decided to use it as a basis for High Society. That and a long term idea about a family being chased through France. It is a sort of follow on from Playing James as it uses the Colshannon family and Holly’s sister Clemmie as the main character.

An epic! And quite a change of form for me. I missed the epic novels of my childhood, sitting on the beach with a fat book, and wanted to write something similar. I also have always wanted to write something with a bit of adrenalin in it and thought of sailing when watching it at the Sydney Olympics (naturally the sea link is from my childhood). This combines action scenes, love affairs, excitement and bit of light-hearted banter all based around the America’s Cup - which is the world’s greatest sailing trophy.