Paradise Lane

This is Paradise Lane, my latest book.It came out in January of this year.It isn't the first book I have written about Durham but it is of a different style than anything I have written before.It's a quest, the story of a young woman who comes to Durham to find her family in Edwardian times.

The picture on the cover is so exactly right for the book, it looks like the upper end of Weardale where parts of the story are set. Even the little bridge is so typical of the moorland and the image fits in with the desolate way that the heroine feels when she comes north from a rich leisurely life in London.

Annabel has problems when she gets to Durham so I gave her a very good place to stay,with Mr and Mrs Hatty in the Garden House Hotel in North Road. 

This is what it looks like now but I don't suppose it looked any different in 1902. Mr and Mrs Hatty never lived there but I like to think they did.
Annabel searches in the town and in the Durham dales to try and find her mother.She isn't even sure her mother is alive. She enlists the help of the young man who runs the newspaper office in Saddler Street, Ned Fleming and together they do everything they can to discover what happened to Annabel's family.

This is Sutton Street, the kind of house where Ned's uncle lived and which he moves into when he falls out with his father and takes over the newspaper that his uncle ran. It has the typical Durham bay window upstairs which I always think is a wonderful,mad idea.The house is very important to the story,not least because Annabel and Ned find a clue to her mother's history and possible whereabouts there.

Annabel begins work as a newspaper reporter and writes a report on a pit disaster from the woman's viewpoint and she also covers a wedding in the cathedral which is vital to Ned's future.

And this of course is the cathedral and the old fulling mill from across the river on a fine March afternoon. It's been there for eight hundred years. I love it dearly.

Paradise Lane is published by Severn House and will be coming out in big print and audio with Magna Large Print Books