Annie Groves- About me and about my books Annie Groves is the pen name under which I write Liverpool set sagas for Harpercollins (you can read about my books under my Penny Jordan pseudonym on my Penny Jordan site) I chose ‘Groves’ for my writing surname because it is my mother’s maiden name and I chose ‘Annie’ simply because I love the name. So far I have written two separate series of books as Annie Groves, The Pride Family trio and the WW2 quartet.

The initial ‘spark’ for the Pride Family books came originally from my grandmother. I spent many happy hours with her as a young girl listening to her stories of her family and her own life.

Writing the WW2 books has led me into areas of research which have filled me with fresh admiration and respect for my own parents’ generation and all those who experienced those years.

I now have well over 60 books on my bookshelves relating to Liverpool during this period, in addition to huge amounts of internet research material, and still there are things I am learning. This research has touched my heart and my conscience in so many different ways. My own parents met during the war, and ‘because’ of it.

Sadly my father died just as I was starting to research my books. In common with so many men of his generation, he rarely spoke to the War to us as children as we were growing up, other than to relate ‘jokey’ things. It is only since his death that via my research into the War in general, and thanks to my mother, I have been able to get a broader picture of how very much a part of ‘the war’ dad and so many others like him were.

I hope to find time at some stage to post about my research in greater detail and shall no doubt then be referring to where my father was in relation to those events.

Neither of my parents appear in the books but I am hugely indebted to my mother to whom I have been able to turn for anecdotal help and information. She has also broken the rule of a lifetime and swapped her favourite reading material of gardening books and biographies to read my Annie Groves books. Mostly she’s given them and me a ‘good report.’

I am now working on a second series of WW2 books. Once again these are set in Liverpool, which is where my father’s paternal family lived. Here again I should mention my dad, because I think of him often when I am writing, remembering his tales of ‘the dockers’ umbrella’ (Liverpool’s Overhead Railway), New Brighton and Wallasey, and most of all Liverpool itself and its maritime history.

I still feel a thrill of awe when I see ‘a big ship’ remembering how very proud my father was of the part Liverpool played in the development of cross Atlantic shipping and the famous ships themselves. His father, my grandfather, sailed with one of the many Liverpool based turn of the 20th century shipping lines, prior to WW1. It was quite something to see his name written in the company’s records, on a research visit to Liverpool’s Maritime Museum.

I’m sure by now that you’ll all recognise that I am something of a ‘research junkie’. I shall try not to bore you too much but do be prepared to read about the – to me – wonderful nuggets of information I come across when I am researching, and which for one reason or another don’t make it into the books.

The new series will comprise five books, and I was so very pleased when Harpercollins offered me this contract, and do thank all my readers for making it possible for me to continue writing and being published by buying my books.

Each book will be an individual ‘read’ with its main character’s ‘story’ reaching a point of resolution (or as we in the trade refer to it in more technical terms – a happy ending.). However, those characters’ lives will continue into the following books in the form of secondary stories. That is to say that the young couple who fall in love in Book 1, could still be in the background of Book 5 as the parents of young children.

Writing books with a ‘bigger’ cast of characters is something I’ve always longed to do. As a younger author my thoughts ran almost exclusively along lines suited to one to one romances, with a pair of characters; their problems, and the eventual resolution of those problems. I’m a slow developer and it’s only really now that I feel able to write realistically about extended relationships outside that intimate one to one situation.

Personally I’m glad that I waited, because I’ve found such joy and fascination myself in writing about ‘family life’. I have just completed the first book in the series, and I hope that you will enjoy reading these books as much as I am enjoying writing them.