The 15th in my ‘Saltbury Chronicles series is now out and it’s a tale of the healing power of true love. I suppose most romances end with a couple getting together, or perhaps with a wedding. But to me that is only the start. Hopefully if the love is successful there will then be a whole life-time of togetherness, with all it’s inevitable ups and downs.

We met our friend Hazel Fauld when she was sixteen and still at school. She’s twenty-six now and a huge success.  The Rock band she started with her sister and named ‘Fauld’, after their surname, has a million-selling third album out and has just completed a triumphant European tour.  But as well as being a Rock star she’s also a brilliant designer in her mother’s fashion empire, and she’s both partner and nurse to her beloved wife, Annie, who adores her more than ever.  It all sounds like bliss, except that much as she tries to conceal it, she’s totally overworked and it’s starting to show as she tries to please everyone, from wife to fans to her Mums.  She’s drinking too much and getting dangerously close to a breakdown.  She’s also increasingly homesick: a country girl born and bred, living in London but longing to be back in her pretty home village of Wyeburn.  Meanwhile, she’s at that stage of life when all her friends are having babies, even her big sister Róisin (well sort of), along with someone else who inexplicably tears at her very soul.  There is a solution though, one that Hazel had never even thought of, but which fills her true love with delight.

And what of her incorrigible little sister Sofie? She’s nine now and seems to be becoming a teenager a little early. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool tomboy, obsessed with music, football, oh and her primary-school friend Andrew. Meanwhile seven-year-old Danielle has just discovered Elgar much to the surprise of her Rock fixated family.