Hearts and minds

Anyone stumbling across a list of my books on Amazon might wonder if there has been some mistake.

My new book, More Than Love Letters, is a romantic comedy, complete with hearts and butterflies on a baby-blue cover. But my backlist features the rather less emotionally charged Property Disrepair and Dilapidations: A Guide to the Law. Not so many butterflies there.

From housing law to chick lit would be a leap for any author – so how did it come about? As part of my day job as a law lecturer at Cambridge University I write articles for academic legal journals on housing and homelessness law.

In 2005, I was sitting down to write another, this time on women asylum seekers escaping domestic violence in their home countries, and how their problems are ignored in asylum law. But then I thought, who will actually read this? A couple of dozen legal academics and maybe an enlightened law student or two?