I made no posts in June or July. My only excuse is the I have been busy bouncing edits to and fro with my editor progressing my second novel, ‘BIRCHLAND HALL, toward publication in September. I’m now waiting for a proof copy through the post to get the physical feel of the book in my hand.

Birchland Hall is a novel of family drama revolving around a Victorian mansion in the West Yorkshire town of Dewsfield, set in the late 1990s. Cousins Mo and Freddie Holtbury, strangers since an unfriendly childhood, now in their fifties, meet on a bleak October day, the only family at Aunt Ethel’s funeral. Neither has married, both are only children. The dilapidated mansion, built by their great-great grandfather, with its contents, is their joint inheritance.

Strangers to Yorkshire, they discover the sway their Holtbury forebears held in the once proud manufacturing town. They face an unsought responsibility to bring life back to Birchland Hall.

Over months the cousins’ lives entangle, searching for family connection.