Lewes-based novelist Merryn Allingham has penned everything from Regency romances and wartime sagas to cosy crime novels. Murder at Abbeymead Farm, set in a 1950s Sussex village and the sixth in her Flora Steele Mysteries series, is available now in paperback (Bookouture, £7.99), on Kindle and Audible, while her latest Summerhayes novels, The Girl from Summerhayes and The Secrets of Summerhayes, chronicling the effects of two world wars on a Sussex house and its family, are also out now
The book I loved as a child
My father was a soldier so my childhood was spent on the move, constantly changing schools and regimes, making new friends and even adopting new accents to fit in. I idolised the eponymous heroine in LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables – an outsider who ended triumphant.
The book that inspired me as a teenager
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I fell in love with the wild, magnificent Yorkshire landscape and the equally wild Gothic romance. Today, my view of the novel is very different. When I recently reread it with a book-group, I found it an abusive and difficult read.
The book I’ve never finished
I’ve tried finishing The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing several times – it’s a known classic and I taught university literature for years – but I have such little sympathy with its heroine that the tedium of large sections of the novel keep defeating me.
The book that moved me most
Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell. The death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, is a tender and poignant story told through the eyes of Hamnet’s mother, Anne Hathaway. Heartfelt and beautifully written.
The book I’m reading now
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris. I love Harris’s books for their pace, plots and sheer readability. His historical research is meticulous, yet it never overwhelms.
