Be careful what you wish for...

A friend asked several years ago, after commenting on a celebrity autobiography she'd been reading, if I would be willing to write my own life story. Having devoted my adult life to the study of Japanese art, spending most of my time with my nose in a book or hovering above a Japanese print, I considered it unlikely that my existence would be eventful enough to warrant lengthy disclosure to the entire world, and responded 'I should be so lucky, who'd read it?'

Less than six months later I found myself living alongside nightmare neighbours. The events of the years which followed, in which I was unfortunately forced to play the joint lead, along with my husband, were incredibly traumatic. My life was suddenly more than worthy of a handful of books and possibly a couple of movies, but I certainly didn't consider myself to be lucky at that point.

I began to write about my experiences, using them as the basis for a work of fiction, and that's when the Guppys were born. Initially a rather serious tale about the systematic torment of a young couple by a pair of sinister elderly bullies, the young female character's struggle to come to terms with her situation, and her subsequent realisation that murder was her only means of escape, the book took a turn towards the satirical early on and prompted a complete rethink. As my situation had improved, so too had my outlook, and my writing had begun to reflect this change.

And so, The Wonderful Demise of Benjamin Arnold Guppy, which will be released in the New Year, is not a deep exploration of the effects of living with nightmare neighbours. It is a satirical account of the transformation of an ordinary thirty-something woman into a calculating killer, and the demise of the man responsible for that change. It is a tale of blackmail, turnip tossing, and the cold-blooded murder of an incredibly irritating old man.