The Music-Makers [2001] was my first published novel, but it was actually number five in the overall scheme of things, with the remainder sitting, to this day, in the near-ubiquitous bottom drawer that all writers share. All four of the other early books came close to being published, but not quite close enough. So when The Music-Makers came out, I was cock-a-hoop. Unfortunately for me, my publisher then ran into financial difficulties – not, I hasten to add, on account of my book – and the grand launch came to a juddering, excruciating halt. Anthea Morton-Saner, my then agent at Curtis Brown [she has since retired] managed to sell the book on to Droemer Knaur in Germany, who agreed to translate and publish it on the understanding that I changed sex. This I was prepared to do. I painlessly transmogrified into Maria Reading, and the book went on to mild success. I’m still very fond of it, although, to all intents and purposes, I have now reverted, like all good recidivists, to the male writer I originally was.

The book [if you can ever find a copy, because the rights, like the author, reverted] tells the story of a lifelong love affair between Jonathan Audley and Frances Champion – a love affair marred by Jonathan’s apparent betrayal of Frances with Frances’s nymphomaniac sister, Clara, whilst the trio were on holiday on the Ile du Levant. Now approaching fifty, Jonathan has finally been given the all-clear after a lengthy bout of cancer treatment, and his doctors have told him that he had better get on with the rest of his life. The trouble is, he has never really moved on from the day of the betrayal, thirty years before, and his recent close brush with death has merely aggravated that regret. The prospect of an imminent reunion with Frances and Clara at a family funeral turns his thoughts back to the past, therefore, and to whether such a past can ever be redeemable. As the events of the present unfold, the narrative switches back and forth between Jonathan and Frances’s childhood in Cornwall, via their adolescence in the South of France and the events surrounding the May 1968 riots in Paris, through their early adulthood with all its unwanted complexities, to the present day, and a dramatic showdown with the by-now serially alcoholic Clara. The Music-Makers is a rites-of-passage story of sexual awakening, tangled relationships, highly-charged emotions, love, betrayal and jealousy, leading to an emotionally cathartic climax which transforms Jonathan’s life forever [I couldn’t resist putting in that last bit].

The novel, during its tragically short appearance in the bookshops, garnered some pretty fair reviews. Here are a couple of them:

‘a very good first novel…I am sure it will do well. I particularly liked the French and Italian bits, and the atmosphere of those times, when young people were getting their teeth into LIFE. A contemporary novel that should appeal to a younger generation, and any other person of an age to remember the Sixties.’
Rosamunde Pilcher

’this remarkable novel…a crackerjack of a story, brilliantly told with great tenderness and a wonderful sense of observation – a tale of sexual awakening and charged with a great many emotions.’
Tim Manderson’s Special Selection in Publishing News