I've been writing for several years and have now written fifteen novels including Bamboo Heart: A Daughter's Quest , Bamboo Island: The Planter's Wife, and Bamboo Road: The Homecoming, A Daughter's Promise, The Tea Planter's Club, The Amulet, The Lake Pavilion, The Lake Palace, The Lake Pagoda, The Lake Villa, The Fortune Teller of Kathmandu, The Orphan House, The Runaway Sisters, The Child Without a Home and the Forgotten Children.
Bamboo Island: The Planter's Wife is the second in my WWII SE Asia collection and was first published in the UK in March 2016. It was inspired by the research I did into the second world war in that region when I was finding out about Dad's wartime experience and writing Bamboo Heart: A Daughter's Quest . I read a lot about the Malaya Campaign and the Fall of Singapore. I was struck how the lives of every single person in the region was affected in one way or another by the Japanese occupation. There were horrific stories of massacres, starvation, of unbelievable cruelty, but also amazing stories of sacrifice, hope, love and survival. I wanted to write about the conflict and occupation from another viewpoint; that of an ordinary British woman, a rubber planter's wife, caught up in tumultuous events that change her life forever.
Here's a bit more about Bamboo Island: The Planter's Wife
Malaysia 1962: Juliet Crosby, a plantation owner’s wife, has lived a reclusive life on her Malaysian rubber plantation since the Second World War robbed her of everyone she loved.
The sudden appearance of a young woman from Indonesia disrupts her lonely existence and stirs up unsettling memories. Together they embark on a journey to Singapore and Indonesia to uncover secrets buried for more than twenty years.
Juliet is forced to recollect her prewar marriage, her experiences during the Second World War – hiding from the Japanese in Singapore before being captured, tortured then imprisoned with other intertnees in Changi Prison – and the loss of those she once held dear.
Bamboo Heart: Daughter's Quest was originally entitled The Pomelo Tree and completed in early 2011.
I uploaded the first 7000 words onto YouWriteOn, a peer review website and had a lot of helpful comments and good feedback from site members. My page is here. The Pomelo Tree (revised) climbed to the top of the YouWriteOn charts in June 2011 and earned a professional critique from Nathalie Braine, an editor at Orion.
In response to her suggestions, I changed the name of the book and completely re-wrote the modern story setting it more firmly in the 1980s by incluing the Wapping Riots (which I remember very clearly myself, having been living in North London at the time). It was co-incidence that the first significant riot was on 15th February 1986, the anniversary of the fall of Singapore. I used that in my first chapter to link the two time-zones.
The other two novels I completed before my first published book are (neither of which are published) are--
"Silom Road", set partly in modern day Thailand, about a middle aged career woman, Kate Miller, whose husband is killed in a car crash. After his death she uncovers many uncomfortable secrets about his life. The book follows her on her journey to discover the full truth about his connections to the criminal underworld in Bangkok. I am currently working with my editor to revive this story.
"Shivaji's Ladder" is about a young woman, Isobel, who finds out that her father was adopted as a baby and that he was in fact the illegitimate son of the wife of an Indian Army officer. Through discovering her grandmother's diaries and travelling to India, she gets to the bottom of family secrets which had been kept from her for a lifetime.
The Orphan House (originally published as The Foundling's Daughter) was inspired by looking into Dad's family history. Dad's grandfather, Brice Bennett was the headmaster and superintendent of a county school in Wargrave, Berkshire. The school, for the children of paupers was in the building of the former workhouse. In my book, three women, Sarah, Connie and Anna are connected across the decades by events which took place in the orphanage in the 1930s. There is an Asian connection of course - this time in India. Anna is the wife of an army officer in the days of the Raj. The book builds on some of the ideas I had for the first novel I completed but which has never seen the light of day, Shivaji's Ladder.
My Writing - some notes about my first two books