Fiction

I’m currently writing two novels – both recently fully-drafted, but still works-in-progress.

A Minute’s Grace

Harriet is one of the first historians to travel back in time. But will she be tempted to use this new technology illegally to reunite with her sister Matilda, who died five years ago?

Harriet Atwater, a 26-year-old junior fellow in history at Cambridge, joins a secret research project in the fourteenth-century fenland after one of the lead researchers goes missing. Wandering through the eerie, flooded landscape, the team soon realise that they are not the only intruders. The medieval villagers are being visited by a group of ‘holy men’, and Harriet suspects that these mysterious figures have something to do with the plague that is killing the village children unnaturally quickly. But as she starts to realise the potential of this technology, she becomes increasingly tempted to abandon the project and try to save her sister – especially as she has always blamed herself for Matilda’s death.

You can download the first chapter of A Minute’s Grace here. The image is of Denny Abbey, in Cambridgeshire.

I worked on this novel during a three-month Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course, which I completed in March 2016. I was one of the six writers selected for a Fiction Feedback event with Ella Diamond Kahn via Spread the Word in June 2016, I was selected for Penguin Random House’s Write Now Live event in February 2017, and shortlisted for Retreat West’s First Chapter Competition in July 2017. I’m currently being mentored by Sam Eades at Orion through the WoMentoring Project.

Of Others and Elizabeth

Wiltshire, 1886. When working-class Jack and middle-class Elizabeth meet briefly, it’s an encounter that alters them both forever, although they’ll only meet once again.

Jack Radden, a young farm labourer, secretly longs to manipulate others’ lives and others’ secrets, although the isolated village where he lives does not offer him much scope. When he hears of the Hayes family and their ambitious daughter, Elizabeth, he is soon plotting to find a place for himself among the Hayes servants, who have formed their own complex web of alliances. However, it is Elizabeth that he eventually comes face to face with and Elizabeth who becomes his primary target – unless she can save herself by breaking him. Told in five different voices confined to a single household, Of Others and Elizabeth explores how our small misreadings of others – even those we feel we know best of all – can lead to much bigger consequences.

You can download the first chapter of Of Others and Elizabeth here. The image shows woodland near Conkwell, Wiltshire.

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