I thought I’d let you know that I’m working on my next novel, The Museum of Confiscated Property, which is set in contemporary London.

Briefly …

Although it is only a two room affair in a Clerkenwell backstreet, the Museum of Confiscated Property has an eclectic collection of stuff from all over the world: where else would you find copies of provocative Picasso cartoons of Franco confiscated at the Port of Genoa when Mussolini was in power; an elegant Georgian sword stick with a hallmarked silver handle from the gates of Ascot races; and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland taken from a traveller in China on the grounds that it anthropomorphised animals – all under one roof.

Chapter 1 starts with …
The curator of the Museum of Confiscated Property would be the first to admit that there were probably a hundred more venerable museums in London, but that didn’t bother her. No, what bothered Maria Cordobes was that the collection was so diverse, it resisted ready classification. And Maria did like to classify things, to impose order, to obliterate randomness. As a toddler she had arranged her teddy bears on their shelf by size and her dolls by hair colour, but it was only when her father allowed her to reorganise his jumble of books using her own version of the Dewey Decimal Classification that her talent really blossomed. After that, there was no stopping her. She sorted her mother’s wardrobe not just by type of garment but by season, and her younger brother’s toy car collection became a daily challenge as Carlos never returned the vehicles to their allotted positions. Now thirty, Maria knew she had it in her to be an accomplished curator. She dreamed of dealing with historically important artefacts and working alongside fellow specialists in a fully equipped museum. But for now, she would continue to put in her time at the Museum of Confiscated Property – two musty rooms in a Clerkenwell backstreet, open by appointment only – and acquire the experience necessary to apply for a job at one of the major London museums.

I hope to be ready to publish this novel in Winter 2020/21.

Please feel free to get in touch.