Authors Electric

          I've been thinking about names quite a lot recently. A friend asked me why I had called my most recent book The Amber Heart.  (She hasn't read it yet, otherwise she might have guessed!) But if I'm honest, this is a book that has had many different titles over the years, including Noon Ghosts and The Sorrel Horse. I still quite like Noon Ghosts but it didn't 'stick' for some reason although I used the title for a radio play set in Poland instead. One of my previous agents had an aversion to the word 'horse' in any title, so the Sorrel Horse had to go. When I was doing the last major set of rewrites to this novel, I began to see that the piece of jewellery which runs through the story and is central to the plot had to be amber: a heart shaped chunk of this precious resin, set in silver filigree. When I first visited Poland, my Great Aunt Wanda gave me a necklace which she had managed to hang onto throughout the war and beyond...