Michelle’s First Book

“Without Charity” was Michelle’s first published book.  There is a special place in every author’s heart for their debut work… it is often intensely personal in flavour, and usually the result of years of hard toil.  We asked Michelle how “Without Charity” came to be – and what it means for her. What made you…

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Looking After The Trees

The Forest is central to Torak’s world, and it has always struck me as a bit ironic that in order to make the paper to bring readers Torak’s story, masses of trees have to be cut down. However, some forms of paper are more environmentally friendly than others.  For instance, some paper comes from trees…

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A Magnificent Obsession

Authors often suffer from “Second Book Syndrome” – after a promising debut, the next book is both challenging to write and harshly judged against the first.  In Michelle’s case, there were no such worries.   “Glorious storytelling!” enthused Sarah Broadhurst in The Bookseller, picking A Place In The Hills as one of the Big Name Paperbacks…

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Catching Shadows

Michelle, the setting for The Shadow Catcher is a new one for you…  much of the story takes place in colonial Jamaica.  How did you go about researching that period? First of all I had to do masses of reading in the British Library, and the Colindale Newspaper Library – which has all the Jamaican…

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The Shadow Catcher

The Shadow Catcher

EDEN. In the depths of the lush Jamaican forest stands a ruined house of haunting beauty – the last remains of a great estate founded on slavery. Abandoned for decades, it still casts its spell down the generations. A place of dreams, magic and madness. Worlds away, ten-year-old Madeleine’s untroubled Scottish Scottish childhood is cut…

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A Stranger On A Train

A chance meeting on a railway journey unleashed a chain of events that changed Michelle’s life… and set her firmly on the right track… The man on the train didn’t look like a guardian angel. He looked as if he had just blown in from a tropical photo-shoot. He wore a safari jacket, combat pants…

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A Place In The Hills

A Place In The Hills

Michelle’s second book was A Place In The Hills: a story of love in the hills of Provence that echoes a tragic love affair of long ago. ‘And now like Pegasus I ride the stars, I walk the spellbound moon.  The horse of darkness treads the sky And I am with him…’ Antonia had become…

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Without Charity

Michelle’s first book was Without Charity, a glorious novel of family secrets and forbidden love. Sarah is devastated when her lover Dominic betrays her, and to help her recovery she takes a job writing the history of an old manor house, once the home of her father’s ancestors, now owned by an American University.  Here…

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