Write, Read, Retreat
How are you all? I'm just back from a retreat at Moniack Mhor writers' centre near Inverness in the far north of Scotland, with the MA/PhD group of friends I've been writing with for over fifteen years. Coming at the end of a long period of research and work on the new novel, it was perfect timing. The sun shone all week for us - imagine dazzling blue skies and bright yellow, coconut-scented gorse. We worked, we hiked, we swam in the (rather bracing), loch. We talked late into the night. We laughed - a lot. It's a great gift to have a group of friends you trust implicitly, and there's nowhere I'd rather have given the first reading of 'The Golden Hour.' The new book is an epic twin-timeline story which interweaves the desert explorers, priceless treasures and decadent cabarets of WW2 Cairo with the restless hearts of expat lives in bohemian 70s Beirut . Archaeologist Lucie's mother is dying - she's also been lying. As her home, the 'Pari
