The writing of Honor’s Ghost has its roots in 1998, when my lifelong writing ambitions changed from a vague “one day I’ll write a novel” to a more concrete “stop talking about it and get on with it….” I began a series of creative writing courses at the City Lit in Covent Garden, culminating in the completion of an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, London in 2006. During this time I learned a great deal about the craft of writing and the challenges of tackling a full length novel.
The idea for the book goes back to my childhood, when my grandmother would enthral me with her own childhood stories. Whilst teaching me the skills of a seamstress, helping me to make elaborate clothes for my large family of dolls, she told me about her mother Annie, and her father Bill, and their unusual and dramatic lives.
So I was always fascinated by Annie and Bill. And when, in 2000, my aunt and I discovered the appalling secret of their graves, my imagination took over… and the rest is told in Honor’s Ghost….
But it wasn’t just their story that fascinated me. It was the impact of their lives, and their deaths, on their numerous forbears, that engaged my imagination, how patterns repeat over time, often in slightly distorted ways… and this became the central topic of Honor’s Ghost.
I wanted to cover seven generations in the book to capture the Biblical idea “the sins of the fathers will be visited on their sons unto the seventh generation,” and it was this that led to the story of Isabelle, in her future world.
I therefore used all three sources of material for the fictional writer – research for Annie and Bill, some of my own experiences and memories, fictionalised, for Honor, and pure imagination for Isabelle and her world. Of the characters in the book, the creation of Isabelle’s near future world was the most fun; and the half factual and half imagined of Annie and Bill’s story was the most moving, and healing. As for Honor… well, her story was the most difficult…. and I wish her all that she wants….
Some recent reviews of Honor's Ghost:-
Review of the first two chapters by John Mitchinson QI
I was very impressed by the extract. You tell the tale well and confidently and manage (just) to keep the bubbling well of ideas and professional insights from swamping the characters. I got a real sense that you were trying to do something original and important – to re-channel the understanding we derive from therapeutic practice and the latest neuroscientific research back into fiction. It’s usually the other way round: professionals taking people’s stories or myths and transforming into them into theory. By reversing the polarity you might be creating a new species of fiction that actually helps people to live richer, more reflective lives (although sot science fiction writers would claim they have always done this). But to do it without delivering a sterile, programmatic novel is a huge challenge and it seems to me you have made an impressive start.
Review of the whole manuscript by Anna South, The Literary Consultanc
“Reading Honor’s Ghost is an experience akin to be taken on a whirlwind tour of the mind and soul. Just as it speaks to the intellect, so it does to the heart. While it’s a provocative, stimulating, questioning piece of writing, it’s also one that offers a sense of calm and serenity. This is a novel suffused both with a sense of your passion and commitment as its author, and a sense of its own purpose. It’s a story that illustrates the significance of story-telling for meaningful living, and has an attractive sense of urgency about it: Honor’s Ghost feels like a book that needed to be written.”
Mhaletta Taylor
This creative work takes the reader into a state of omni-present where time merges - the past and future become inseparable and the present is indefinable. Where can the reader go other than inwardly to sense the continuity and timeless re-emergence of lives, visible and invisible? But what is the essential message for the reader? Each must find their own, as they unravel the moving mind-threads and re-fashion their own reality-cloak ……. unless they find themselves unwrapped on the threshold of tomorrow.
Jill Cooper
A fascinating journey through the lives of one family where the reader is transported effortlessly from the present, back to the ancestral past and then forward to the future. From the first page to the last I was taken into a world that was identifiable through my own life experiences and also into times and places in the future that were alien and yet still recognisable.
This is a book that holds the reader’s interest, frequently full of surprises whilst cleverly weaving its web of intriguing events, right through to the final chapter where the mystery becomes startlingly clear – a very clever twist and most unexpected. Honor’s Ghost made me step back and analyse my own life and for that I am grateful to the author as it has made me realise that I am extremely happy to just “BE ME” …. content to be in my own skin.
