At long last, meet Grace,

Grace, my central character in Beneath the Shadows, is particularly special to me. She is the first fully fledged character I ever developed, and finally, ten years after she first came to me, I am thrilled to be introducing her to the wider world. My first image of her was back in 2001, as she woke from a hellish dream to find herself caught in a waking nightmare – her husband vanished and a small child depending on her, living in isolation, adrift from everything she’d ever known. The first piece I wrote back then survives virtually unchanged at the start of the second chapter of Beneath the Shadows.

Grace was probably sparked in part by my own vulnerabilities at the time, as I began to acknowledge that I was struggling with the corporate world and the 9–5 grind (not to mention the four-hour daily commute that I undertook each day to keep working in publishing). I was also beginning to admit to myself just how much I wanted to be a writer, something I wouldn’t share with many other people for a good while longer. Working in an international publishing house, I could see things from both side of the fence. There were writers coming into the offices every day, who seemed to be living my dreams. But there were hundreds more whose submissions never made it past the first reader, and some of them were very talented. It appeared that writing for a living required a combination of talent, originality, perseverance, nerve, and luck, and I wasn’t sure I had either the fortitude or the aptitude for it.

In the end, I couldn’t shake off my dreams that easily. But Grace has had to be very patient, while I developed my career as a freelance book editor, moved from the UK to Australia, got married and had a child, and decided to write another book – Come Back to Me – first. But through all that time she has never left me. She has been waiting in the wings waiting for her moment. And now I hope everyone enjoys getting to know her and her wonderful sister Annabel as much as I have.