I was picked out of a baby line-up by a young couple who’d travelled all the way from Scotland to New Zealand to find the child of their dreams. Well, that’s how I always pictured it.

What is true is that my parents were Glaswegian, and they adopted me and both my brothers in New Zealand, later whisking us off to their bonnie homeland to live for four years. We didn’t last two. After eighteen months Mum and Dad fled with us back to the land of sunny beaches and long warm summers, conceding that they had lost their Hardy Scots status for good.

This short overseas experience instilled in me a love for travel and a fascination for cultures, stories and languages not my own. So I went on to study French and German literature, fell for a guy with the oddest and loveliest accent I’d ever heard, and have spent much of my married life bouncing about the globe with him, following hearts and jobs to settle in countries as varied as Germany and Pakistan, France and India, Vietnam and England. And while I've enjoyed my years of university teaching and academic editing, it’s fiction writing that I’ve found to be the most challenging and absorbing job of all.