Provence, the Luberon and an old house on a hill...
Update: I'm still here, still quietly working away in these strange, unsettling times. I can't say I've worked all through last year, but I have a rough draft now of the hardest and most rewarding book I have ever attempted. Its scope has expanded though, and I now envisage a two-part work in the same volume. The first will be a fictionalised novella based on my mother Joy's diaries, set in Moscow in the late 1950s at the height of the Cold War. The second will be a memoir of her, and our experiences as a f
My thinking is that this might seem odd at first glance, but actually could be very satisfying. And sometimes writers have to try new formats, surely, or all books would conform to the same dull template. This is the idea I'm currently working with, anyhow. It's a way to avoid compromising the drama of a spy story based on real, known events, in particular the continuing enigma of Kim Philby before his unmasking as a Soviet spy, while also examining the personal price paid for what she herself called "an in