Because of the Bridget Jones phenomenon, everyone seemed to think that women in their thirties were man-starved, incompetent, ditzy and frazzled.

Ash, my heroine in this book, is anything but. If anything she’s far too cool and composed on the outside – although she does suffer from panic attacks which can be terrifying for her and which mean that she has to shove her head into a paper bag to stop hyperventilating.

She hates making commitments to men, if she thinks a relationship is getting serious she ends it immediately.

I wanted to write about someone who was seeming self-contained and had everything going for her, but who had a more difficult private life that people around her suspected.

Astonishingly, Ash is one of the characters that many readers say they are most like!

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