Spell in the South

My major work in progress, this is a projected series of four contemporary novels set in France. I won the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2010 on the strength of the first in the series and spent the entire month of July living at the Hotel Chevillon, at Grez-sur-Loing, south east of Paris, while I researched and planned the second volume.

Estelle is 31, single, overweight and grieving for her recently deceased mother. She's moved from the north of France to work as a waitress in a café-bar on the French Riviera, in search of sunshine, excitement and maybe even love. After three years, she's still not found it but then Benoit appears, first filling her dreams, then meeting her eyes as he carries his four year old daughter out of his pranged car underneath her apartment block window. Can he be the man for her? Would it be fair on little Cindy and his wife?

And who is the pantomime gypsy woman who lurks in the shadowy service lane beside The Mistral café? Can she really be Estelle's aunt - sister of her long-gone father - or is that a devious trick to win Estelle's confidence and steal her hard-earned wages?

And is this 'aunt' right when she tells Estelle she, too, has a special gift which the gypsy can help her develop? If that's not true, how does Estelle instinctively 'know' where things are when no one else can find them? And why did her mother choose to keep her father's tarot cards and crystals locked away in a case at the bottom of her wardrobe, so many years after he disappeared?

Spell in the South is the first of four planned novels featuring Estelle. As yet unpublished, it won me the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in July 2010.

Read an extract:

The wind carried the sounds from the beach to her ears before she was half way down to it: the crash of bigger waves, the rumble of jetskis and tinny music mingled with the tang from the seafood restaurants. Looking down through fig and olive tree foliage she could see the rows of blue and green sun-loungers and hear the flap as the mistral tossed the scalloped edges of the parasols. This bend always thrilled her, no matter her mood. She could feel the heat radiate from the low cement wall that edged the path down, see lizards scurry from their suntrap to hide in crevices. At the next bend, she would see the stark rock walls that cupped the tiny cove, studded with succulents pushing up out of any craggy land-hold that would sustain them. And at last, the shifting mass of the turquoise and azure sea.

In minutes she had passed by the noisy play area with its trampolines and had crossed to the other side of the beach. She threw down her quilted mat and towel, stripped off her tee-shirt and skirt and, tummy held in tight by the panel of her reinforced swimsuit, edged her way over the hot pebbles towards the water. One step, two – the sea temperature was 28°C according to the handwritten figures on the chart by the life-guard’s station. In the distance, the sea was whipping the waves into froth but here, in this cove, there was calm. Slender young men lounged in damp shorts that clung below the fuzz of their belly hair; lithe Italian girls in bikinis tight as tattoos shrugged their sleek black hair and forded the pebble coals on elegant limbs. Beside them, Estelle knew herself to be plump but she had her rights. Another two steps and the chill of the water reached her waist, snatching her breath. One, two, three bobs and she grew used to it. A kick against the stones at the bottom and she was up, swimming in the water, concealed by it, turning on her back and floating in it, buoyed up and supported between the forgiving sea and the non-judgmental blue of the Mediterranean sky.