The Witching-Hour Lovers follows a couple with an emotionally-charged connection built around the fragile hope that they will someday be together. Where did the idea behind this novel come from? 

The Witching-Hour Lovers grew out of a lifelong fascination with people. I’ve always been an observer. I watch expressions, moods, smiles, silences, and I find myself wondering what lies beneath them. What drives people? What are they longing for? How does love shape the choices they make, and the lives they ultimately lead?

I also drew upon my own relationship with love. For much of my life, I believed it was something that happened to other people, not to me. Then I found myself in the unexpected position of being loved, or at least being told I was loved. My instinct was to resist it. I argued against it, questioned it, and looked for reasons why it couldn’t be true. Eventually, I stopped fighting and allowed myself to experience it.

What I discovered was both beautiful and painful. I came to realise that pure love, the kind that asks for honesty, vulnerability, and courage, is often far more difficult to carry than we imagine. Modern life is full of obligations, fears, expectations, and compromises, and sometimes love alone is not enough to overcome them.

That tension became the heart of the novel. I wanted to explore what happens when two people share a profound emotional connection but find themselves trapped between what they feel and what they are able to choose. At its core, The Witching-Hour Lovers is an exploration of hope, longing, and the difficult truth that it is often not love that breaks us, but hope.

Much of the novel’s emotional weight comes from texts, voice notes, missed opportunities, and fleeting encounters. Why were those small moments so important to the story?

Because life is often made up of small moments rather than grand gestures.  We grow up on stories that tell us love is defined by dramatic declarations and happy endings, but in reality, relationships are often built in the spaces between those moments. A text message received at exactly the right time, a voice note replayed over and over, a fleeting encounter that lingers in your thoughts for days, or a conversation that never quite happens. These seemingly insignificant moments can carry enormous emotional weight because they become the places where hope lives.

I wanted to capture the reality of modern relationships, where technology allows us to be constantly connected and yet still profoundly distant from one another. A person can be only a message away and still feel unreachable. Sometimes a few words on a screen can make your heart soar, while silence can be deafening.  The small moments were important because they reveal character. They show what people do, rather than what they say they will do. They expose longing, hesitation, fear, and vulnerability in ways that grand romantic gestures often cannot.

Just as importantly, I never wanted there to be a villain in this story. Real life is rarely that simple. Most people are carrying histories, responsibilities, fears, loyalties, wounds, and obligations that shape the choices they make. Sometimes those things become a brick wall through which love simply cannot pass, no matter how genuine the feelings, how intense the longing, or how devastating the consequences.

For me, that is where the real heartbreak lies. Not in a lack of love, but in the painful reality that love alone cannot always overcome the barriers people carry within themselves or the circumstances surrounding them.

Those small moments became the emotional heartbeat of The Witching-Hour Lovers because they are the moments most readers will recognise from their own lives. The story asks a difficult question: what happens when two people genuinely love each other, but life gives them no way to cross the distance between them?

Did you ever find yourself sympathizing more with one character than the other?

No, and that was very important to me as I was writing the novel.  I felt the pain of both characters. Sophie’s, because she never expected to experience this kind of love, and Alan’s because he found it and wanted to love Sophie in all the ways that mattered, but life itself became the barrier.

There were certainly moments when I felt the pain of one character more acutely than the other, and that is because I was Sophie in a previous chapter of my life, but I never viewed either of them as right or wrong, because, Alan to me, did love and in my own chapter, I knew there was love, but responsibility and duty was the winner.  One of the great mistakes we make when looking at relationships is assuming there must be a hero and a villain, a person who loves more and a person who loves less. Real life is rarely that clear-cut.

For me, Alan’s final unsent text says everything. He writes that he needed to keep his heart. The connection he shared with Sophie was his heart, yet in choosing duty and responsibility, he ultimately broke his own heart. That felt profoundly human to me.  I do have enormous sympathy for both characters because I understood what each of them was carrying. One is living with longing and uncertainty, while the other is trying to navigate responsibilities, fears, loyalties, and the consequences of choices already made. Neither position is easy, and both come with their own form of suffering.

As the author, I was less interested in deciding who deserved sympathy and more interested in exploring the human cost of impossible circumstances. Sometimes people hurt each other not because they lack love, but because they are trapped by the realities of their lives and by the limitations of what they are capable of giving.  If I sympathised with anything, it was the tragedy of two people who genuinely care for one another and yet cannot find a way to bridge the distance between them. That felt far more interesting to me than assigning blame.

I wanted readers to come away recognising pieces of themselves in both characters. Depending on where someone is in their own life, they may identify with Sophie, Alan, or perhaps both. To me, that is where empathy begins.

What are you exploring in your writing now that you didn’t explore in this novel? 

This novel explores longing, hope, and the emotional space between what we feel and what we are able to choose. Much of the novel asks what happens when love exists but circumstances prevent it from being fully lived.  What interests me now is what comes after that.  I find myself increasingly drawn to questions of healing, resilience, and identity. How do people rebuild themselves after loss? What parts of us survive heartbreak, and what parts are transformed by it? How do we learn to carry grief without allowing it to define us?

I am also interested in exploring love from different perspectives. The Witching-Hour Lovers focuses on the ache of possibility and the tension of what cannot be. In my future writing, I would like to explore what happens when people stop waiting for life to change and begin actively choosing themselves.

I will always remain fascinated by human connection in all its forms. I suspect I will always write about love in one way or another, but I am becoming increasingly interested in courage, self-discovery, and the quiet strength it takes to move forward when the story you imagined for yourself is no longer possible.  

Poetry has always been at the heart of my writing. Long before I wrote this novel, I wrote poetry from a deeply personal place, drawing upon emotion, memory, and the complexities of the human heart. In fact, I was writing a poem when the words kept going and going, and I realised this story needed its own book.

Some of my poetry can be found on AllPoetry.com. I suspect that, for a little while at least, I will return to poetry as a way of processing and releasing many of the emotions that have found their way into my writing over the years, while I continue to discover where my fiction wants to take me next.

For me, writing has always been about understanding people. The questions may change, but the curiosity remains the same. There are countless fabulous, heartfelt, funny, sad, and painful stories all around us. Just take a long walk along the Embankment and pay attention to the people you pass or encounter. We all have a story.

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