The love triangle dilemma
So many of the great romances in novels and movies are love triangles. Just think of Outlander, The Hunger Games, Rebecca, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Great Gatsby, The Notebook and one of my old favourites Dr. Zhivago.
I guess two people falling in love, getting married and living happily ever after is boring! We must all be yearning for conflict, tension, high stakes, rash decisions ... and maybe we enjoy living all this vicariously.
That’s one of the reasons there’s a love triangle in my novel The Way Things Fall – one woman and two very, very different men in different parts of the world. And in both In Love With The Night and A Long Walk With Fate, it is clear that a person may be in one place, but their heart is definitely somewhere else!
Hope you enjoy the tension!
Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder?
I've always been fascinated by the idea of creative criticism. How can you make a living critiquing art? How do you know what to look for, what makes a painting good or mediocre or brilliant? Because I’m lucky enough to have friends who are artists and because I worked for many years with highly creative people, I was driven to find out more about the world of art criticism and, in my novel, The Way Things Fall, I decided this should be the career of the female protagonist, Rachel.
In all three of my novels, painters and paintings feature prominently. In The Way Things Fall, Steven an up-and-coming Canadian artist, is one of the chief male characters. He reappears in a supporting role in In Love With the Night. My third novel, A Long Walk With Fate, concerns Aiden, a young man who is plucked from his impoverished existence in Vancouver and thrust into a whole new world of strange experiences before realizing the true promise of his enormous creative talent.
Despite the research I have done for these novels, I cannot personally claim to have any expertise in this area. To me, a painting should make you catch your breath, or it should seduce you, draw you in closer, make you forget where you are.
Displayed on this page are some of the paintings in my home that do exactly that for me. They are the work of very good artist friends - Gary Hesketh and Rhoda Payne in Canada and Alain Lélé in France. Click on any of these paintings to visit their websites and see more of their work.
Its silence and its mystery
I have been lucky enough to have traveled through many different deserts: the Sahara, the Arabian, the Kalahari, the Namib, the Wahiba sands, and others. The landscape is almost mystical and I find myself drawn back time and time again. When you stand quietly seeing nothing but the endless drifts of sand for miles and miles, and hear not a single sound, you feel both alone and insignificant but also totally free. I am always reminded of the quote by Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “He loved the desert because there the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle flames.”
It was my father who sparked my interest. Stationed in Egypt in World War II, he spent a lot of time in the desert, learned some of the ways of the Bedouin, and developed a deep respect for their culture. He would tell me stories when I was a child and I grew up determined to explore this part of the world for myself.
Desert scenery is a big feature in my novels and of course the characters are as entranced by its magical splendour as I am! In 2024, my husband and I travelled across the Atacama desert in Chile and part of my third novel - A Long Walk With Fate - is set there.
