Working Title: Hot Air

I always said my readers – and heroines – would grow older with me, but the commercial pressure to keep writing young female leads has often made this tricky to navigate. The solution was to write a book with a mother and daughter at its centre. I love a big ensemble piece, gathering extended families and friendship groups in ever tightening plots, so I invented a group of friends who had known one another since university in the 90s and remained close. As an older mother – I had my girls in my late thirties – I also find it fascinating that friends of mine who became mothers much earlier are at such a different stage, me lugging nappies in my bag while they lug L Plates. That’s Mia and Lainey, best friends in The Summer Wedding, whose daughters are a generation apart.

Trivial fact: Like The Love Letter in which an actual letter barely featured until the title was changed prior to publication, the ceremony in The Summer Wedding was more of a sub-plot, and the book required some hasty rewriting to fit its brief.