Photo credit: Adrian Harvey
Describe your latest book.
Unsettled Ground is about 51-year-old twins, Jeanie and Julius, who still live with their mother Dot in rural isolation and relative poverty in the English countryside. They don’t have a bank account, don’t have any qualifications, don’t own a car, and have very little access to technology. They’ve managed for all their lives like this — growing vegetables and doing odd jobs for people for a bit of cash. But when Dot dies at the start of the book, Jeanie and Julius discover that she left them with a lot of debt, and the cottage they live in isn’t actually theirs. They suddenly have to negotiate life outside the bubble they’ve been living in. And they don’t do it well.
They might not have enough money, but what Jeanie and Julius do have is music. Jeanie plays the guitar, Julius plays the fiddle, Dot played the banjo, and their father the piano. They would play folk music together at home, and it’s not until Jeanie is forced to play publicly that everyone realizes how skilled she is...