Learning To Swim

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Gorgeous... If you're looking for something escapist and bittersweet, I could not recommend more' Pandora Sykes on Small Pleasures

I recognize Vincenzi's frustration all too well. My own novels are romantic comedies. They're about women who are in the throes of relationship problems, or facing huge moral dilemmas. Comic on the surface, they are, at heart, love stories - and that's precisely what I want to write. I am proud to be writing romantic fiction. Clare Chambers was born in south east London in 1966. She studied English at Oxford and spent the year after graduating in New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was 25. She has since written eight further novels, including Learning to Swim (Century 1998) which won the Romantic Novelists' Association best novel award and was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and In a Good Light (Century 2004) which was longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize. The Radley's were extraordinary, captivating creatures transplanted from a bohemian corner of North London to outer suburbia, and the young Abigail found herself drawn into their magic circle: the eccentric Frances, her new best friend; Frances' mother, the liberated, headstrong Lexi; and of course the brilliant, beautiful Rad.Sometimes I wondered why Abigail was so drawn to the Radley family. They didn't seem that interesting to me and they kept making her feel uncomfortable. The fact that they completely contrasted with her own family is a factor, but it doesn't seem enough. Abigail, when we meet her, is a cellist in an established orchestra and it is not until she attends an after show party and is introduced to Marcus Radley that we start to get a glimpse into the life of this young woman. When she was younger, Abigail was reserved and had few friends. An only child she was serious and had little in common with her peers. Then we are told of her fledgling friendship with the new girl, Frances.

I write about the tangled affairs of the human heart. After all, the search for someone to love, and who will love us in return, is the most important - and difficult - adventure of our adult lives. Yet I cannot keep count of the number of times people have said to me, "Of course, I don't normally read that sort of book," and then add with an air of impertinent surprise, "But I really enjoyed it." But most of all, I wasn't particularly captivated by the Birdie story. The character wasn't very developed so I didn't feel like I got to know her at all. And I found it strange that she started spending all her time with the Radleys, not to mention the fact that she never spoke to Abigail again after she was broken-hearted and instead started going out with Rad all by herself. What kind of a sister does that? Clare began her career as a secretary at the publisher André Deutsch, when Diana Athill was still at the helm. They not only published her first novel, but made her type her own contract. In due course she went on to become a fiction and non-fiction editor there herself, until leaving to raise a family and concentrate on her own writing. Some of the experiences of working for an eccentric, independent publisher in the pre-digital era found their way into her novel The Editor's Wife (Century, 2007). When her three children were teenagers, inspired by their reading habits, she produced two YA novels, Bright Girls (HarperCollins 2009) and Burning Secrets (HarperCollins 2011).

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review: Quirky book, follows a formula I have seen before - shy quiet lonely person gets drawn into a colourful family, and eventually they are treated as a member of the family, before some tragedy results in their total ejection and rejection. But does it well, and the ending, whilst unlikely, satisfies. But, on the flip side, it will also continue to be the biggest selling genre both in the UK and around the world, and I am delighted to be part of that. Romantic fiction is uniquely unfortunate in that no other literary genre is judged by the worst examples, rather than the best. No one feels the need to sniff at historical fiction or science fiction, however dubious the quality - those genres are accepted for what they are. But it's hard to get romantic fiction reviewed or discussed in a way that isn't patronising, which is a problem that, say, crime writers don't have.