Sunday Times bestseller!

If you follow me on Twitter you will not have been able to escape the news that OUR HOUSE is now a Sunday Times bestseller! The trumpet-blowing and please-just-stop-now preening perhaps bear a little context. OUR HOUSE is my twelfth novel and among the other eleven there have been hits and misses. Translation and TV deals have come and gone. In the UK alone, I've had four publishers, two agents, nine editors and over a dozen publicists. But none of the books, until now, has made it into the hallowed Top Ten of the Sunday Times bestseller lists (the hardback of OUR HOUSE got stuck at number eleven - poor me). Meanwhile, I and my fellow old-timers have watched debut after debut swan straight up the charts, propelled not only by authorial talent but also by the love we all have of The New. So an overnight success I am not. When my first novel was published, I was 35 and my daughter was a baby. Now I am 50 and she is doing her GCSEs. No wonder I'm exhausted. Exhausted and very grateful to my agent, Sheila Crowley of Curtis Brown, and the dream team at Simon & Schuster who did it. They really did it.