Cornish speakers may spot the significance of the novel’s name, Trevow. How does an author decide what to call their work? Some people start with a title in mind. Others hold on until they have finished a draft before the title comes to them. In our case, with multiple authors all with ideas of our own, we had a list of suggestions. They included characters’ names, events and hints about the story, some of them humorous and others mysterious, but we kept coming back to the novel’s theme which is ‘home’.

We were reminded of stories that bear the name of the place in which they are set; stories in which the setting is almost a character in the drama: Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, for example.

Everyone in our story is affected by ‘home’, whether or not they have one or are seeking one. Trevow sums it up.

Here is an artist’s impression of the grand house, Tregethlan, that is home to our characters Anneke and Margaret. Thank you to Servane Trefusis for letting us use her painting of the old house and its great cedar tree, which will occur again later in the story.