Dear friends and supporters,

A very merry Christmas to you all and my very best wishes for a wonderful year in 2017! I can't thank you enough for your enthusiasm for GHOST VARIATIONS through the year that is now ending. At a time when the world has left me with a few serious questions to ask someone, sometime, about what on earth was going on, you have helped me hang on to a bit of faith in humanity, and that's the most valuable thing there is. THANK  YOU and hope you've been having fun.

We've had a very quiet Christmas here, not least because my mother-in-law died a week ago today. She was nearly 92 and had lived through the turmoil of rising fascim in the 1930s: she was one of the Jewish children rescued from the Nazis and brought to England on the Kindertransport in 1938. Her parents and brother in Berlin were deported and murdered. I will never forget mentioning to her that I was writing a historical novel; she asked when it was set, and when I said "the '30s", she just laughed. To her, that wasn't historical. It was contemporary. 

True - in more than one way. This seems to be the aspect of the book that jumps out at people, and no wonder. Historical fiction isn't only historical: it's a prism for refracting light to shed on the present and it is also a distancing device to help make current issues palatable. I'm thrilled to find that GHOST VARIATIONS is Book Choice of the Month in BBC Music Magazine and this, plus the gender politics of Jelly fighting her corner in a man's world, is  much to the fore in their review. Here it is - enjoy!

After all, you've helped to make this happen, so the good news is yours too.

Love,

Jessica