I write fiction. When I wrote A Time For Silence, my first book to be published, I saw it primarily as a contemporary novel with historical overtones, but I was told that it would be classified as a crime novel. Which is fair enough; there are crimes in it. But in my head I was just writing about people dealing with distressing situations that were turning their lives upside down, and making them confront strengths or weaknesses within themselves that they hadn’t realised were there. The cause of their predicament may have involved a crime, but really it ran far deeper.

Before I wrote crime fiction, I wrote what could only be described as Science Fiction. Fiction set in the future, on a space ship or on alternative planets, so sci-fi really sums it up. Except that what I was really writing about was people dealing with distressing situations…