About Isabel
Thank you for visiting my website and for your interest in my books. I was born in Warwickshire, read English at Cambridge and after spells in the theatre and in advertising, I got a job at the BBC. I had twelve very happy years at BBC World Service radio where I was a producer and reporter in the Features department and in Current Affairs. I travelled widely compiling documentaries in Central America, Australia, Africa and the Far East. I also wrote freelance articles for magazines and newspapers such as The Spectator, the Evening Standard, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph who, in 1997, commissioned me to write a comic, girl-about-town column, Tiffany Trott. Within a month of the first column appearing I'd been signed up by HarperCollins to turn Tiffany's adventures into a book. To my amazement HarperCollins then said they'd like another book, and another, and so somehow, without having set out to be a novelist, here I am. My earlier novels are romantic comedies: they have a catch in the throat - my heroines have always seen the sad side of life - but they're definitely lighter reading. Now, from A Vintage Affair onwards, I've moved towards novels set in the present and the past, Shadows Over Paradise, which I set on wartime Java, being my most historical novel to date.
A bit about my personal life; I live in London, very close to Portobello Road, with my partner Greg, our two young children, and my younger stepson. In my spare time I play table football and charge round the park with our Cocker Spaniel, Alfie.
