Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London.

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.

You know I don’t listen to market gossip,” she began, “but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter’s name is mentioned.

We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.

Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.