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Author Description Stitching together an author profile on the terrace of my garden on the Greek island where the opening scene of The Noontide Sun is set I have to start at the end - the past few years during which my sons and I have planted a garden in our favourite place, the island of Paros, many of whose locations have been borrowed for my fictional island of Kryptos.<br /><br />The intensity of the blue and white island-scape of the Cyclades has seduced many writers, most notably Lawrence Durrell, as it does those who fetch up here for a few weeks in the sun and find themselves experiencing so much more. So it was with my husband and me and our first two sons when we fetched up here in 1969. We returned as often as we could, adding a third son along the way, and now our grandchildren love the island as much as their fathers did.<br /><br />I was born in the small seaside and links golf course town of Carnoustie in the east of Scotland and became a journalist in Glasgow where I met my husband, also a journalist, and we raised our sons. It is still my home for the greater part of the year. <br /><br />My father-in-law was a poet who spearheaded the Scottish literary renaissance as well as the stirring of Scottish identity that has led to the current separation debate, and my husband was heavily involved in the politics of the movement.<br /><br />My literary references were quite different. I loved the oblique style of earlier British women writers, in particular Muriel Spark, but before her Rose Macaulay, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stella Gibbon and Elizabeth Taylor. Early John Updike, particularly the short stories, Philip Roth, Anne Tyler and Donna Tartt are all favourites. For atmosphere – the tug of place on a susceptible mind, in the case of his Border Trilogy, Mexico – I have a huge admiration for Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps my single favourite book is Ian McEwen’s Saturday which I find close to perfect.<br /><br />In The Noontide Sun I have sought to capture the spell that the Greek island landscape casts on its visitors as the background to a literary thriller that I hope will make page-turning and evocative holiday reading. <br />

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