The Great Big Thank You: A modern fable

I grew up in Liverpool and yes, at heart I'm the stereotype - a warm-blooded enthusiast who likes nothing better than swinging between a good laugh and a good cry, and to whom silence is alien. People are endlessly interesting, and there's so much about the world that I just need you to know! I studied languages as a route to reading even more books and am a keen amateur singer.

My home town is the setting for Amateurs (2024), a coming of age novel, in which a slightly precious young composer collides with an amateur choir, and in doing so comes to a new understanding of family, identity and talent, all scrambled since her twin sister's brain injury.

My published fiction includes A Backward Glance (novel, 2016), a re-working of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; a series of stories, Art My Eye (2016); and Joe Faber and the Optimists (2020, prompted by the experience of my husband's stroke). Serious comedy is the furrow I'm ploughing now.