Welcome to my website
Writing is my work and my passion
I spent 12 years living and working in different African countries in the 1970’s and 1980’s
Coming of Age in Botswana is set mainly in Botswana from 1979 to 1985. It chronicles my work and family life on the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
Growing up in the Mandara Mountains is a memoir based on the research I did in Nigeria on pregnancy and childcare customs after the birth of my daughter. We spent time with healers and traditional chiefs in remote villages finding out about local customs.
In The Line of Duty my historical First World War novel, was published in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association Joan Hessayon New Writers’ Award in 2015. Set in North Wales and London in the First World War, the novel draws on family memoir, historical fact and my own imagination.
Written in Francistown Botswana between 1982-1985. African Twilight is the story of a young Englishwoman’s attempt to adapt to a way of life on the one hand totally alien and on the other frustratingly similar to her life in England. Her struggle to gain some independence from her workaholic doctor husband and two small children is mirrored by the wider struggle of the minority tribe to gain its own independence.
Jenny is fascinated by African culture and forms an intense but fragile relationship with an African recently returned from studying overseas. Like the pace of African life itself the story unfolds gradually over a period of her first eighteen months in a small African town. Then circumstances overtake her, her sense of reality finally deserts her and she leaves her family for a white farmer, only to find that she is re-living the story of his own mother.
Jenny feels trapped – a woman alone in a land she is unable to understand. She becomes caught up with the rebel forces on the run after an attempted coup. It is not until after she has courageously delivered a message for her friend, the guerrilla leader whose life she failed to save, that she regains her self-esteem.
I am also an Educational Author and have written and edited Social Studies books for Africa and the Caribbean.
When I lived in Southern Africa I was a stringer for an African national newspaper and published a number of articles in British magazines.
