Secrets of Our Hearts

This is the new Severn House edition of one of my darkest books, originally called The Forests of the Night. It’s World War Two, but the action moves between past and present.

The story centres on three prisoners of war who knew each other as boys, and a fourth who has a toxic interest in their relationships to each other and himself. There is a terrible secret which is not revealed until the very end (and just in case you thought of cheating, looking at the last page won’t help).

As an army child I’d lived in the Far East, and the research for this novel took me back there, to Changi Prison in Singapore and to the infamous Death Railway itself crossing Thailand to the Burmese border. I also spoke to many survivors of the Railway, who were extraordinarily generous with their time and their painful memories.

In spite of the harrowing nature of the book it remains the quickest I’ve ever written – the characters and story seemed to spring ready-armed from my head.

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