This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Emma publishes a novel every two years, a routine that childbirth and divorce — there are three little Boosters and a brace of ex-Booster husbands — has never managed to derail.
Her novels occupy the curious, contested space that stretches between literary fiction and commercial romance. Once in a while they get reviewed in the national press, at other times not. At book-trade events where others of her kind are gathered together, Emma can often be heard lamenting what she likes to call the “snobbery of the reviewing establishment”.
Still, if the pages of our broadsheet newspapers are not open to her, there is always social media. Emma’s last novel, That Cretan Summer (Boggis & Stone, £16.99), was finished on 17 April 2023.
This news was relayed to the Twittersphere at 8.30 the following morning, by way of a screenshot of the manuscript’s title-page beneath the caption: Just off to lovely Hermione. On thorns to see what she thinks. Hermione is Emma’s agent. Happily, by 23 April Emma was able to assure her 2,130 followers that Hermione so encouraging. Thrilled to hear best one yet.
By early September she tweeted pictures of all five alternative cover designs
No milestone on the almost year-long publishing process went unremarked in cyberspace. Come late May, Emma could report that Wonderful Charlie — Charlotte is Emma’s editor — says absolutely on board, together with a screenshot of herself and Charlotte eating celebratory muffins in the Boggis & Stone canteen. There were further remarks about the advisability of strong female characters and an expectant sign-off: sure cover will be terrific and can’t wait to see.
A short period of silence followed whilst Emma was wrestling with Charlotte’s editorial comments, broken only by an assurance that it was so good to be working with someone who really understands what you are trying to do, but by early September she was able to tweet pictures of all five alternative cover designs and invite her followers to vote on them.
17 people plumped for design number four, although in the end the Boggis & Stone art department went for number three. Really grateful for thoughtful feedback and the knowledge that people are rooting for me, Emma tweeted two days later.
Marketing plans, the sit-down with publicity, the pre-Christmas despatch of proof copies — all these, too, had their moment in the online sun. That Cretan Summer was eventually published in the spring of this year. There were one or two reviews and Emma was commissioned to write for the Sunday Times travel section about her holiday in Chania and the merits of Cretan country wine.
She was also able to alert readers to the fact that the Duchess of Edinburgh had recently been photographed in a frock similar to that worn by her heroine as depicted on the book’s cover and that a forest fire had engulfed the Cretan countryside only a few miles distant from its setting.
Meanwhile on social media, X is agog with the disclosure that she will shortly have some really exciting news which I can’t wait to share.
