‘My Fat Brother’ is my first novel. It’s the story of two brothers living in London and the way they’ve remained set in their childish jealousies, until, through the theft of a penguin and the love of two good women, they finally manage to reconcile and see each other as adults, and friends.This is loosely based on my own experience – I have a brother, living in London, and we once came up with a plan to steal a penguin from London zoo, although we were never quite brave enough to execute it. Ben isn’t fat, however.

My second novel, The A to Z of Us, will be published by Penguin in June. It looks at that thorny question of whether a man and woman can ever be ‘just friends’. The answer is … yes, if they get the ‘sex’ thing out of the way. Which is, of course, all part of the fun.

I am currently beginning my third novel. It’s set in London’s East End, about an American woman who inherits a house in London from a mother who left her in the States when she was a baby. She finds herself getting involved with a family on the East End street, and ultimately falling for the son, Jack, a lovable slacker whose is still scarred by the death twenty years ago of his older brother from leukemia. Hopefully it’s going to be a book about parents and children, about how we need and suffocate one another, and about the different ways people choose to define their lives.