In fifty years I have written thirty-two novels, and only one of them refused to leave me alone until it was finished.
Adam & Eve began with a date. On the fifteenth of September 1940, Hitler had an army waiting across the Channel, and on that day he changed his mind. I could not stop asking myself what might have happened if someone had made him change it differently.
Before I wrote a word, I read the war leaders’ own speeches and sought the advice of two eminent historians. Then I read Leo McKinstry’s history of Operation Seelöwe and had to sit up and rewrite several chapters. I wanted the history right, so the invention could stand on it.
I wrote my own Dunkirk scene too. Around 400,000 British soldiers were stranded on those beaches, and a Panzer division ten miles away was ordered by Hitler to stay still. Nobody knows why to this day.
That gave me the history. I still needed the people.
So I invented two children, born on the same estate on the eleventh of November 1918, the day the First World War ended. One is the daughter of an Earl who wanted a son. The other is the son of a shepherd who wanted a daughter. I knew from the start that I would follow them from the day they were born to the fifteenth of September 1940. Their England is the one Thackeray and Hardy wrote about, where the family you were born into decided almost everything.
Then I hit the hardest problem I have ever faced as a writer.
I had my two children and I had my moment in history, and I could not join them together. Every version I wrote felt contrived.
The answer came to me at four o’clock in the morning. I do not hesitate to call it the best idea I have ever had. I am not going to tell you what it is. By the fifteenth draft I could finally say now I believe it.
The novel surprised me in another way. It set out as a love story and became a thriller. I did not plan that. It was the way the pen moved.
I still write every word by hand, with a felt tip pen, on lined A4 pads. Adam & Eve came to 150,000 words and more than twenty drafts. I am 86, and that is reason enough to make this my final novel.
My first reader finished it at ten past three in the morning. She told me Adam and Eve were still with her.
A reader gives you eight hours of their life. My job is to make sure they never once think about putting the book down. Six chapters from the end, you should not be able to breathe.
Thirty-two novels on, I hope you feel these eight hours were worth your while.
Adam & Eve, my final novel. HarperCollins. Publishes 6 October 2026.
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