Three months from today, my first novel goes out into the world. Love, Secrets, and a Plate of Sushi is a romantic comedy about Tom, a Swiss man who travels to England for a language course and ends up tangled in something far more complicated than grammar. There’s a woman, there’s a secret, and before the end there’s a very long flight to Japan. Some things, as the cover says, are worth crossing continents for. It’s out on Saturday 16 January 2027. Chapter One is free to rea

Here it is: the cover of Love, Secrets, and a Plate of Sushi, my debut novel. It’s a romantic comedy about Tom Henning, who leaves Switzerland for a six-month English course in a small coastal town, expecting nothing more eventful than verb conjugations and bad weather. Then he meets Kimiko, and discovers, a little too late, that she’s already engaged. What follows takes him from rainy England to her family’s dinner table in the Japanese countryside, by way of one ill-advised

Choosing a release date should be simple. You pick a day, and the book comes out on it. My original plan was early December. Christmas, gift-giving, people with time on their hands: perfect. Then I counted backwards. Proofread, cover design, formatting, advance copies, readers who need a few weeks to actually read the thing. December quietly left the building. I'd never realised that writing the book is just one link in a long chain. And after more than twenty years since I f

Every novel needs a narrator, and mine came with strings attached. Tom Henning turned up in my head fully formed, opinions and all, and made it very clear he'd be doing the talking. Two decades and several rewrites later, I still don't think I've talked him out of anything. So, in the interest of managing expectations, here's what you're in for. Tom is Swiss. Properly Swiss – the kind who grew up twenty kilometres from Berne and will point out, politely and every single time,

Plenty of people say they'd like to write a book one day. Some actually do. Most don't, usually because life has other plans and rarely asks permission first. Mine started on a train. Rewind to 2004. I'd been in Japan for eight years, the last three in Tokyo, and had recently swapped a shaky career as a freelance English teacher for something steadier: a desk job in finance, the field I'd left home to escape and somehow ended up back in anyway. Then my company moved offices f