Far From Home has a Victorian setting. It opens in the west of Ireland where the heroine Brid lives in a humble cottage with her uncle and aunt. She has impossible dreams:

'She forgot the cold, the darkening sky, the little fields below her, and all the old stories which Uncle Patsy had poured into her came rushing back. Stories of Finn McCool, of Cuchullain, of Diarmid and Grainne. Grand stories, wild deeds, bold men and headstrong beautiful women. She could have been a queen of old in her chariot! She saw herself as Queen Maeve, tall, bold, imperious in her cloak of scarlet and gold, her long hair braided with gold threads, golden slippers on her feet, urging on her men, seeing the enemy fall beneath her wheels...'  

 This was my first book. The idea came to me one night in a hotel near Shannon airport where I was due to meet a group arriving off the New York flight the following morning. I was alone and feeling nervous, and as I sat with a glass of Guiness and feeling sorry for myself, it seemed the clouds parted, a great hand pointed down at me, and a mighty voice thundered, 'Write this!' I snatched up the nearest piece of paper and scribbled out the synopsis. 

Not much of that survived to the printed book. Although I wrote the first draft quite quickly, a chapter a day sometimes, large chunks of it went into the waste-paper basket, and equally large chunks weer inserted in their place. 

The novel was intended originally to explore grand historical themes, but I found as I worked that the interest inevitably narrowed down the heroine, and most of the history relegated to the background.

Julia Stone opens in a country village in mid-Victorian England in the home of the dour and reclusive Rev Dr Stone. In this cold and loveless house his only companion is his daughter Julia, his housekeeper, secretary, helpmeet. Julia, intelligent and capable, is stifled by this repressive atmosphere, yet can see no way out. It is her misfortune too to have fallen in love with Peter Cunningham, the most elegant bachelor in the county and as likely to fall in love with her as he is to take to religion. Her need for love and its utter impossibility seem to be tearing Julia apart...

I  had been so immersed in Victorian England and Ireland that it seemed inevitable to write another in that period, though set this time in the English countryside. The idea of this one is quite simple - unworldly vicar's daughter marries rake - and it may have started with a painting.  I often find paintings, especially Victorian ones, a marvellous source of ideas. Take this picture for example:

 It is called "On the Brink". But what is going on here? I originally thought this showed Julia and her new husband at the casino at Bad Homburg after he had lost all his money and is trying to cadge hers. I determined to put it into the story. In the event it turned out slightly differently, though he still lost all their money. I was afterwards informed that the picture actually has a rather different meaning. It is the lady who has lost all her money and the man behind her is offering her a devil's bargain... 

Anne Hunter comes home to Ireland for her sister's wedding with no premonition that her life is about to change for ever. It is 1920 and though the rest of Europe is slowly recovering from the horrors of the Great War, in Ireland the long conflict goes stubbornly on...

I had got it into my head that the Black and Tan War in Ireland (1919-21) would make a good backdrop for a romantic novel, and it was only as I began to read that  I realised what a horrible event it actually was and how hard it would be extract anything remotely romantic from it. In the event, however, I found that, horrible though it undoubtedly was, it exhibited many examples of heroism and chivalry on both sides. It also gave me my favourite hero. The heroine is complex, not to say complicated: moody, difficult, immature, but I managed to sympathise with her by the end.  This was my hardest to write. But, as Doctor Johnson says, that which is written without effort is generally read without pleasure. I hope this can be read with pleasure.

It is the 1870's and the whole of Ireland is gripped by the struggle between landlords and tenants. Determined to save her family from eviction from their farm, naive seventeen year old Abby O'Leary believes she'll be able to talk their landlord into  a postponement of their rent. It is not the landlord she meets however, but his son - and what does he care for the tenants and their problems when he has this beautiful girl before him? The consequences are devastating. Her reputation in shreds Abby has no choice but to flee to London... 

  This one took me back to where I began, the west of Ireland. It is largely concerned with horses and I badgered everyone I could find who had any experience of them for details of hunting etiquette, of dress, of side saddles, and especially of equine psychology. It was relatively easy to write and this was because I made a resolution at the outset to throw every difficulty in the path of my heroine that I could think of: every mistake, every piece of bad luck, every moral dilemma, and it is greatly to her her credit that she rose to every challenge. She is my most likeable heroine and fully deserves her happy ending.

The brig looked tall and sturdy, moored at London bridge. In the icy waters of the north sea in December however it seems very frail indeed. But it is on this ship that Sarah must make her escape from her murderous husband and it it is here too that she first meets the man who is to change her life...

  Partly in order to get away from Ireland I looked about for a new setting and discovered Whitby and the north Yorkshire coastline, which is as everybody knows one of the most beautiful and romantic in England. This story took an eternity to get going and for the simple reason that I was trying to write the wrong story. I really despaired over this one and it was only when I was able at last to stand back and take a deep breath that I realised that I had been all the time looking in the wrong direction. Some readers tell me this story is an amalgam of Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden and there is a superficial resemblance in the opening chapters. After that the story goes its own way. 

This is based distantly on a true event in our family. Back in the sixties my grandmother told me the story of my aunt, her daughter who was a painter and had during the late 30's gone to the south of France every summer to an artists' colony. There she had met a man and had the love affair of her life. I have a photograph of them taken in August 1939. War was declared a few days later and my grandmother described how she went down to the Cote d'Azur and dragged her dasughter home on the last boat out of France. This is the background to Meg. I have however changed everything. Meg is not my aunt and her mother does not drag her home. I wrote most of this story while I was struggling with another; wrote it, as it were, out of the corner of my eye. I am not quite sure what that signifies but the main section of the story was actually quite easy to write. I mentioned earlier how useful paintings are for ideas; in this case it was old black and white photographs, little two-inch square pictures, which I find so evocative.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of change in Ireland. many of the old Anglo-Irish familes, the 'gentry', the 'quality', the 'ould dacency' had been ruined by the potato famine, and their place was increasingly taken by a new and riusing irish catholic middle-class, and by men who returned from the States with money in their pockets.

The Road Home is many things, including a love story, a story of growing up, of lost illusions, a story of how a young man finds his parents when he thought himself an orphan. It has the elements of a thriller and takes the reader into the cell of Irish terrorist group. It is about friendship, about finding and losing and finding love again and about unravelling the past.