I have been lucky enough to be Joanna’s paperback editor for nearly fifteen years now, and have seen her sales grow from good to phenomenal during that time.  All of Joanna’s contemporary novels, as well as her historical novels under the name of Caroline Harvey,  are published by Transworld as Black Swan paperbacks, and nearly all of them have reached number one in the bestseller lists. And when her next novel – The Other Family – is published in hardback in 2010, it will for the first time be a Transworld publication, under the Doubleday imprint.

So my editorial relationship with Joanna is undergoing a significant change, and I know it will be a fantastically rewarding one.  We have a close personal and professional friendship, and enjoy discussing everything and anything under the sun, including poetry, clothes, food, Italy , children, families and (inevitably) books.  We have an ongoing argument about whether we’d rather live in the town or the country. We laugh a lot. It is a wonderful thing to work with an author who is both so warm and approachable and yet so professional, and whose books are so thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying.  I know that the new novel will be as thought-provoking,  elegantly-written and relevant to our times as ever, and I look forward with enormous excitement to this new stage in our joint publishing life.