Spoiler alert – avoid if you don’t want to know what happens before you read the books.

As a writer, I experiment with many genres. However, the first books I published were in the YA category, and although I enjoy writing for grown ups, I love immersing myself back in the teenage world I left several decades ago and writing the sort of stories I would have loved to read then.

What is the Sarah and Steve trilogy about?

The trilogy started off as a stand-alone novel, I’ll Be There For You, back in 1996. I’d always wanted to write about a group of teenage friends and follow the ups and downs of their lives as they navigated sixth form life (that’s Years 11 and 12 in American High School). The novel is narrated by Sarah and focuses on her and her three closest friends, Jules (Julie), Steve and Danny. Before sixth form starts, Jules and Danny pair off, as do Sarah and Steve; and although teen romance is one of the central themes of the book, so are friendship and family life. The book’s an emotional rollercoaster as Steve and Sarah’s intense relationship starts to fall apart following an unexpected intimacy. What follows shows the difficulty of a pre-internet, pre-mobile phone world (it begins in 1993) in which two people who struggle to communicate gradually drift further apart.

Why didn’t the story remain a stand-alone novel?

When I first wrote the story, there was no such thing as self-publishing, so I printed off two hard copies of the story and took it into the school where I was working to get two of the girls to consumer test it for me. The next thing I knew, the novel was being passed around the different year groups and people were drawing up rotas to ensure that everyone got a turn at reading it. Then parents started coming into school for Parents’ Evenings and telling me that they’d ‘read the book’ and enjoyed it. I was still too scared to send it off anywhere, but I knew there would have to be a sequel after one 15 year old girl said to me, “You’ll have to write a sequel, Miss, where Steve goes off to university and cheats on Sarah because that sort of thing always happens.” And then because I didn’t want to leave things on a down note, I thought I owed it to the characters to write a third book that gave them the chance of a happy ending.

You wrote the first novel in 1996 but you didn’t publish until 2018. Is there a reason why you didn’t update the story?

Life got in the way of writing, and I was too busy bringing up my sons (now 25 and 22) to think about writing the sequels to I’ll Be There For You or to think about publishing. It was only when students at another school I was working in asked if they could buy books of my writing (I think they were impressed with the sample stories I wrote for them to model how to construct a piece of creative writing) that I realised I should try to publish; and once I realised I could do that on Amazon through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), I knew I had to be brave enough to try. I didn’t have a digital copy of the book or of any of the others I’d written in the 1990s, but I did still have the print out, so I laboriously typed everything into my laptop after school each night. I think I finished on New Year’s Eve 2017, and the book went live on January 1st 2018. I could have updated the story, but I liked the idea of leaving it in a world with less technology.

You published the sequel a week later. How long did it take you to write?

Believe it of not, it only took a week. I’d storylined the entire novel during an hour long train journey, so I knew what was going to happen. I think I was also still ‘in the zone’ from typing up the first book, so the whole thing just flowed. Even today, I’m still proud of what I accomplished in a week – especially when the second book is a lot deeper than the first. When the Rain Starts to Fall continues Sarah and Steve’s story, but their relationship is already in trouble before he even goes to university as Sarah’s struggling to cope with juggling sixth form life and motherhood. It’s hard for her to see Steve going off to university on his own when it was something they’d planned to do together; and there’s still UST despite the baby they share because Sarah can’t forget how much Steve pressurised her in Book 1 before she knew she was pregnant.

Book 2 sounds depressing…

The word several reviewers have used is ‘gritty’. There are some emotionally tense scenes between Steve and Sarah – and between Sarah and other people as well; but there’s also humour, notably from Jules. There are plenty of parallels with Tess of the d’Urbervilles which Sarah’s studying for A level, including a love triangle with echos of the Tess-Alec-Angel scenario in Hardy’s novel. And Sarah’s no longer the naive teenager she was in the first book. When the Rain Starts to Fall is very much about her growing up and learning to move on without Steve.

Does that mean Steve doesn’t feature quite so heavily in the third book?

Steve and Sarah are both at Leeds University studying for an English literature degree in Book 3 although he’s a second year student and she’s just a first year, so they don’t actually have any lectures or seminars together. Sarah also has a new boyfriend acquired at the end of Book 2, and he’s one of Jules’ housemates – he and Jules are both at Bradford University which isn’t too far away.

So Book 3’s another love triangle?

Sarah feels torn between Andy (who is lovely) and Steve (who’s broken her heart before). Her head tells her Andy’s a better choice but her heart tells her she’ll always belong with Steve – despite eveything that’s happened in their past. Their daughter, Abbi, is an added complication as Steve sees Abbi every weekend now that Sarah’s living in Leeds – and he’s certainly putting a lot more effort into parenting than he did the previous year in Book 2. There’s also a love rival for Andy’s affections in the shape of an Irish girl named Aine who seems determined to steal him away from Sarah. But you have lots of the fun side of university life too, including two friends Sarah makes on her English course who couldn’t be more different to each other: Sue’s a loud, brash redhead who lives life to the full, and Farah’s a shy Muslim girl with a dry sense of humour. There’s a comedic vein that comes as a welcome relief after the intense angst of Books 1 and 2.

The Sarah and Steve trilogy will always have a special place in my heart – partly because I became so invested in the characters as I charted what happened to them, and partly because of the story’s setting which is based on the small northern town where I grew up.

Keep following this page for updates on all things Sarah and Steve, including in-depth analysis of characters, setting and themes.