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Researching… The Yellow House
I love doing background research for my novels, I guess that’s the journalist in me. With hindsight, I researched my first novel Ignoring Gravity too much, I didn’t recognise the point at which I knew...
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Writing today at Costa –‘Forgotten Voices’
Coffee at Costa today, not tea. A medium soya wet latte with an extra shot. My regular morning drink which the staff know by heart. Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. I picked up a great...
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Researching… Tracey Emin: My Life in a Column
I bought this book in the gift shop at the Hayward Gallery in London after Emin’s ‘Love is What You Want’ exhibition in 2011. It is a collection of the columns Emin wrote for The Independent newspaper...
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Choosing the title
My first novel had a variety of working titles, but was generally referred to as ‘Rose’. This was both in my own head, and by my family and friends. “How’s Rose?” they would ask, as if she were real....
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My favourite library… The London Library
I’m a new member at The London Library. Every time I go, it feels like an enormous treat. Why? Well for one, it’s a private library and there is a membership fee which I feel I must justify by regular...
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My favourite library… Hunmanby Library
Sadly, my childhood library at Hunmanby, North Yorkshire, closed last year. The property was sold in February not, as first feared, to a housing developer, but to a local businessman who plans to move...
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Book review: ‘The Lady of the Rivers’
Yet again, Philippa Gregory brings history alive. Her story of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, from her first encounter with Joan of Arc, kept me riveted. She is so attuned to the period and the language that...
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My favourite library… The British Library
I only visited the old British Library, when it was at the British Museum in Bloomsbury, once. When the plan to move to a new building St Pancras was mooted in the late 1970s, I was a student at...
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My favourite library… Cobham Library
Tucked away behind the High Street, in a building that has seen better days, Cobham Library has a surprisingly deep section on Second World War history, my current research topic for my third novel [no...
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My favourite writing notebooks
I can’t be without a stack of pristine Muji notebooks. There’s something about the uniformity of the covers, the satisfaction of a pile of used notebooks collected together with a rubber band in the...
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Writing: the Danby way
□ Start the day vowing to take lots of screen breaks, aim to do exercises to ease neck and shoulder tension. Do none. □ Have endless ideas, too many. Scribble them in notebooks, collect magazine and...
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The reality of adoption
There are two faces to adoption: public and private. Some relatives remain secret, hidden forever, the separated players remaining apart and unknown. Some people struggle with the decision to search,...
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I agree with… Karen Maitland
[photo: karenmaitland.com] “Do all the research, then close the textbooks and just write a cracking good story. It’s the story that has to come first. The detail has got to be right but you’re telling...
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My top 5… literary adoptees
Since I started writing about adoption, my brain seems to be hard-wired to literary tales of adoption. So here are my top 5 adoptees… I am still reading, so the list may change! ‘Great Expectations’ by...
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Long Lost Family: Helen’s story
The agony of birth parents and children, separated for decades, is explored by the UK television programme Long Lost Family which aims to reunite adult adopted children with their birth families....
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Researching the graveyard scene
There is a scene in Ignoring Gravity that I kept putting off writing: the one where Rose searches a graveyard for her birth parents. I simply didn’t know where to start. Rose doesn’t know what she’s...
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Long Lost Family: Laurence’s story
Today’s adoption story from the UK television series Long Lost Family focuses on a birth child who searched for many years for his birth mother but never found her. The sense of rejection never left...
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Best friends and siblings
My novels are about identity, genetic inheritance and the influence of our life experiences and upbringing on the building of character and sense of self. With the mystery of adoption added to the mix....
View ArticleReading for research: ‘Relative Strangers’ by Hunter Davies
The sub-title of this book is ‘A history of adoption and a tale of triplets’ and it is a fascinating read if you are at all interested in family history and adoption. Yes, there is some history, but...
View ArticleFamily history: identifying headstones
Tracing relatives – whether you are researching your family tree or on the trail of your birth family – will inevitably lead you at some point to a graveyard. That process is now easier as 22,000 new...
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